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...

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...

 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...

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...

Several years ago, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, an architecture critic, became interested in new research on how our brains register the environments around us. Dipping into writing from several fields—psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and neuroscience—she learned that a new paradigm for how we...

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...