How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architecture

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The observation that ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’, attributed to Winston Churchill, may be threadbare but it is nevertheless profoundly true. The buildings we inhabit help to make us who we are. Yet, in the run of our everyday experiences, it’s easy to become desensitised to their influences. Buildings can seem at times like little more than the containers of human experience, but they are so much more than that. Architecture can function as a vessel of emotion and thought. It can influence the way you feel about yourself and others. As any great art can change who you are, so can a building. It is the art that you live, work and play inside. If you are willing to spend the time to curiously explore buildings both from the inside and the outside, you will be rewarded with a greater sense of the power of place and, with mastery, a more refined ability to use your settings to control your own experience. Tune in to how a building makes you feel and think. Sitting quietly, contemplate how your body feels in a built space. Note what sights, sounds and other sensations stand out to you, and consider how they are affecting your thoughts and feelings. What can you hear? Spaces ‘speak’ to you mostly by the way that reflected sounds (of footsteps, for example) reverberate and echo. You might try closing your eyes for a few seconds to get a sense of this.

Explore the functionality of a building. Look for clues that a building is fulfilling its functions well (or not), such as the amount of ease with which inhabitants seem to find their way through it. Design inspiration came from this stone, which was treated with great respect and dignity. Guests can enjoy the antique advantages of bathing in this space designed to help them relax and enjoy a relaxing experience. Combining light and shade, open spaces and enclosed areas, and linear elements yields an intensely sensual and restorative experience. Essentially, the interior space has an informal layout that follows a carefully modelled path of circulation, leading bathers to predetermined points while letting them explore other areas on their own. In constructing the landscape, the architect was primarily influenced by his fascination with the magical qualities of stones within the mountain, with darkness and light, with light reflections on water or in the steam saturated air, with the unique acoustics of the bubbling water, with feelings of bare skin and warm stones, and with bathing rituals. Much of what I have learned about the human response to architecture has come from my working life, in which I conduct scientific research on how people perceive and react to different kinds of environments. I’ve pioneered a method that I call ‘psychogeographic walks’, in which I lead people through a series of places while probing their thoughts, feelings and even their physiological condition, looking for associations between architecture and psychological states. The real treasure has come from post-walk debriefing sessions, when participants flesh out their impressions with me and with each other. The recommendations that follow are largely based on such practices and experiences. Though some of this might seem like it has little to do with architecture, there is abundant evidence that the details of your surroundings exert a powerful influence on the patterns of your thoughts, your nervous system, and even the state of your heart and your skin. You might find yourself attending to the world in a different way while immersed in a space with lots of natural features, with less sharply focused attention. If you’re in a tightly constrained space, you might find yourself responding with anxiety and its attendant increase in heart rate and sweat gland activity. D' Angelo, M., 2022. Neri Oxman Takes Her Interdisciplinary MoMA Exhibition Online. [online] Architect. Available at: [Accessed 5 June 2022].But it doesn’t take a massive cathedral to ignite interest in the human response to buildings. You might have experienced similar feelings in many different kinds of settings. Small churches, college courtyards, commercial headquarters (think of the main office of a major bank) can all evoke a response. Even everyday architectural spaces can connect with our feelings. Think of when you last walked into someone’s home for the first time and experienced an ephemeral sense of its atmosphere. Architects have written entire books about these feelings. Allow yourself to move through the space as your desires call to you. Allow yourself to be pushed and pulled by your surroundings. In the mid-20th century, a political movement led by the artist-philosopher Guy Debord advocated exactly this kind of practice, which was called a dérive, or ‘drift’. The legendary Swiss French architect Le Corbusier described what he called the ‘architectural promenade’, which is a similar idea for interiors. He suggested that interiors have itineraries, which are brought to life by our movements as we traverse a space. More generally, architects are preoccupied with transitions – those locations in a building where, as we walk, a surprising vista is suddenly unveiled. Think of the effect of descending a grand staircase or turning a corner to discover an unexpectedly large vault of space, which can cause changes of posture and movement with an attendant effect on our senses, a kind of awakening.

The article ‘Architecture with the Brain in Mind’ (2004) by John Eberhard and Brenda Patoine covers some of the early modern history of scientific interest in the relationship between the brain and architecture. Eberhard was an early proponent of recognising the importance of this connection. The designing process includes a variety of elements that are all connected and equally important individually. The way in which the building is approached, the way the light creates ambience, the scale and proportion of the building in relation to its user, and the way it is placed in its context all create a drama to be experienced. Through the use of space, enclosure, and structure, the architecture is explained. Our senses are enhanced by various thresholds and transitions designed to pause us and make us feel the surroundings. The transitions hold an element of curiosity moulded to form platforms, podiums, and spaces for people to observe the building. The narration of the building starts from an ambiguous concept transforming it into a liveable space with required functions and aesthetics. Mountain, stone, water – building in the stone, building with the stone, into the mountain, building out of the mountain, being inside the mountain – how can the implications and the sensuality of the association of these words be interpreted architecturally?” Peter Zumthor. Buildings are much more than containers for human experience. They have a capacity to stir up emotional responses, serve as symbols, and change how we think about ourselves and others. The BBC article ‘The Hidden Ways That Architecture Affects How You Feel’ (2017) by Michael Bond provides a great overview of the psychology of urban and architectural design, including interviews with some of the key players in this domain.There are some features of buildings that elicit broadly shared responses from humans. For example, psychologists talk about the duality of ‘prospect and refuge’. The idea is that certain locations provide us with abundant sensory information (prospect) and make us feel safe and protected (refuge). Most people have a seemingly innate preference for locations in space that afford both good prospect and reasonable refuge. The 20th-century American architect Frank Lloyd Wright had an implicit understanding of the operation of prospect and refuge, and he used it to make residential spaces comforting by, for example, including cosy, low-ceilinged areas of refuge. The high premium on real estate with large windows and long views (ie, prospect) is also probably a consequence of these inclinations. These ideas have a long history, originating with the thoughts of early researchers of animal behaviour interested in how animals selected habitats. The overarching principle, it was argued, was to see and not be seen. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 19th-century German poet-scientist, reportedly described architecture as ‘frozen music’. It’s a compelling idea, but it might also be misleading. In spite of what I asked you to do in the previous exercise, it isn’t common for us to sit still when experiencing architecture, observing it from a single, fixed perspective. Instead, we are frequently in motion. If we are using a building for whatever it is designed to do, then we are moving through it from one useful place to another. If we are simply enjoying or appreciating a building, then we are still moving, but now driven mostly by what attracts or repels us. In other words, if architecture is music, then the moving observer is the conductor. What about sensations of touch? Even if you aren’t touching anything at the moment, you can have a sense of how something would feel if you were touching it (the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa calls this sense ‘the eyes of the skin’). Look at the textures of the walls and floors. Does it seem as though you are feeling them with your fingers? What does it ‘feel’ like? If you have taken the time to follow some of the instructions in this Guide, and especially if you’ve discussed some of your observations with others, you will have discovered one of the ground truths of architectural appreciation: in many ways, we are all different in how we respond to a space. ArchDaily. 2022. The Therme Vals / Peter Zumthor. [online] Available at: [Accessed 5 June 2022].

urn:lcp:howtoreadbuildin0000crag:epub:a6af2ed8-1400-4c48-b98e-46ed6f24b17c Foldoutcount 0 Grant_report Arcadia #4281 Identifier howtoreadbuildin0000crag Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t34291p7q Invoice 2089 Isbn 9780713686722In many other ways, though, our preferences vary. For example, I can’t stand the style of architecture known as Brutalism, a style characterised by minimal ornamentation, exposed concrete and steel, and a reverence for the raw appearance of materials. Others love the style’s honesty and integrity, and its freedom from the cloying nostalgia of older styles. Architects must learn to attune themselves to the way that a design influences their feelings. This can be a little bit like mindfulness meditation and can be practised with very simple objects – even something like a chair or a vase – before working up to things such as cathedrals or other architectural showpieces. Though a trainee architect takes years to learn how to do this, some practice with the basics will enrich your experience of architecture.