The Walls Around Us

 One, architectural education. Two, real-estate development. Three, building codes, zoning codes, all these things need to be reviewed according to these kinds of standards. Four, architects need to not be so skittish in thinking about hu...

When I was really young kid, nature was nature. It was forests, trees, lakes, rivers. Then people begin to use the word “environment.”

It was a political and social construct, and emphasized the interrelatedness of all these different components within nature. That was a response to pestic...

Architects intuited some of these principles long ago.

The monumental Baths of Caracalla in Rome, a person can bathe under an eight-foot ceiling, but there’s something about a 150-foot ceiling that makes a man a different kind of man.

However, this new science of architecture and the...

Cities undervalue the importance of the design of the built environment altogether. There is this sort of professional split between high architecture and building, which research shows is just fallacious. It’s all architecture and it’s all important, because it’s all having an impact on people a...

Architects tend, particularly with parametric design, to emphasize overall aggregate form, and all that other stuff gets filled in later. And then, very often, it’s value-engineered out.

That’s what’s creating a lot of the impoverishment in the environment. To have “sticky” places—places t...

We’ve had in the last 20 years a kind of ocean of new information about how the brain actually works. Most of that was confirming the precepts of embodied cognition, and also going beyond it in certain ways, showing how multisensory our apprehension of the environment is.

What we now know a...