Science / Medicine : The Psychology of Architecture

In 1983, about 100 office workers in Ottawa, Canada, picketed the Les Terrasses de la Chaudiere, a large new government office building, protesting indoor air pollution, uncomfortable offices and, in general, what they described as a poor working environment. Complaining of nausea, fatigue and headaches, they refused to go back to work until the problems were corrected.

One problem, it turned out, was the tight building syndrome, a phenomenon in which people believe there is insufficient fresh air circulating through an energy-efficient building. But that was easy enough to fix. Or so it seemed.

Instead, some of the health complaints proved to be psychosomatic. In addition, many of the workers simply did not like the building. It is large and impersonal, and the open-plan office space provided little privacy and little natural light. Five years later, malaise still lingers over the building.

The Ottawa experience is another illustration of the importance of the emerging field of environmental psychology, which studies the relationship between human behavior and the artificial environment, an area of research that has broad ramifications for human performance.

Researchers increasingly are realizing that productivity and work morale are directly affected by a building’s architecture and its indoor environment.

A 1985 symposium hosted by the National Science Foundation concluded that improvements in an office’s physical environment can increase productivity by 5% to 15%. And the American Productivity Center in Grand Rapids, Mich., says such improvements can increase productivity by as much as $50 billion a year in the United States.

“Organizations’ attitude toward facilities has shifted from the office as a place to house work to the office as a tool of work,” said architect-turned-environmental psychologist Michael Brill, director of the Buffalo Organization of Social and Technological Innovation of Buffalo, N.Y.

“There is no question that as more knowledge develops in this field, there will be more applications of it,” added Irwin Altman of the University of Utah, a pioneer in the field.

“Probably 60% to 70% of all built environments these days have some environmental psychology applied to their creation,” said John Zeisel, president of Building Diagnostics Inc., a Boston consulting firm that conducts studies in environmental psychology for architects, building owners and government agencies in the United States and Canada.

“The interesting thing about environmental psychology is that it is not confined to academic psychology departments but is practiced and applied to environmental design by sociologists, architects, planners and designers all over North America and abroad,” Altman said.

Environmental psychology got its start as an architectural fad in the early 1960s when new suburbs and planned urban developments were sprouting throughout the country. Architects and planners began seeking the advice of behavioral scientists in designing socially responsive housing for groups of people they knew little about.

For instance, studies of high-rise public housing developments showed that less crime occurred in buildings in which entry lobbies, stairwells and courtyards can be seen by passers-by and residents. This started a trend toward open, observable spaces and away from hidden entries and windowless stairways.

Research also showed, for instance, that the mere location of people’s homes greatly influenced their behaviors. Neighbors with adjacent driveways became friends while those with driveways on opposite sides of the adjoining properties did not. People with unfenced back yards tended not to use them; those with fenced yards did.

Although much of the research by psychologists and sociologists was eventually incorporated into building design, most fledgling environmental psychologists in the 1960s were still congregated in college psychology departments. And they found it difficult to translate the results of their research into specific design guidelines.

The low point in relations between designers and psychologists came in 1973 when some innovative design decisions based on social research for the large Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis were judged to have misfired, resulting in the demolition of the buildings.

The housing project was built with wide balconies on every floor, which allowed people to open their front doors onto a shared open space. Researchers thought this would encourage residents to get to know one another and provide play space for their children.

Instead, the families who moved into the developments habitually entered their homes through the back doors, and gangs of vandalizing adolescents took over the wide balconies. The maintenance and repair of this project became so costly that it was eventually deemed too expensive to operate.

Disappointed that they could not predict psychological and behavioral responses to specific design decisions, architects in the 1970s began to concentrate on energy-efficient designs. Energy considerations include orienting buildings to control sun and wind exposure, reducing the amount of circulated air, sealing windows and installing equipment so that individuals can control heat and light.

Unfortunately, however, many of the commercial buildings designed to save energy cause problems for their occupants.

And as problems such as indoor air pollution and poor ventilation came to light, building engineers and facilities managers turned to environmental psychology techniques to help solve these problems.

These techniques include pre-design programming, which is the process of determining and analyzing the anticipated uses of complex buildings, as well as post-occupancy performance evaluations.

For example, when workers complain about poor ventilation, odors and pollution, performance testing may uncover problems in the air-handling systems that can be diagnosed and repaired. If such complaints persist, there may be other environmental conditions, such as stress from high levels of office noise.

Brill said many of his clients, which include Westinghouse and Steelcase, an office furniture manufacturer, provide enclosed offices for their senior executives and managers so they have enough privacy to be fully productive. Brill also advises clients to use walls or partitions to offer some privacy for workers in large, open rooms.

Environmental psychology also is being applied increasingly to improve the design of senior citizen housing.

Among Zeisel’s clients is Retirement Inns of America, a Los Angeles-based developer of retirement housing.

Some of Zeisel’s design recommendations include clustering units in an apartment complex into small groupings--rather than stringing them in rows along a corridor--to encourage neighborliness.

Despite many gains in the past two decades, environmental psychology has yet to become a full-fledged science. But that may change soon.

Interdisciplinary graduate programs in environmental psychology are offered at many universities, including UC Irvine.

Many graduates of these programs are going to work for small consulting firms that specialize in contract research and environmental consulting--focusing, for instance, on correctional institutions and the U.S. Postal Service. And since 1982, the International Assn. of Applied Psychology has had a division of environmental psychology.

The Environmental Design Research Assn., which held its first meeting in Pittsburgh in 1968, has nearly 1,000 members and is scheduled to hold its 20th annual meeting in May in Pomona. The conference, which will focus on “Human Interaction With the Natural Environment,” is being hosted by Cal Poly Pomona, whose School of Environmental Design is about to embark on a strong regional program of environment-behavior research.

For many designers, environmental psychology has already become an asset to their practice. Ed Woll of Tomko & Woll, a Los Angeles architectural firm, has worked extensively with environmental psychologists.

“The time is coming,” he predicted, “when it will not be possible to design buildings without them.”