CONTRASTING THEORIES

THE PRACTICAL FAILURE OF ARCHITECTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

by Duncan Philip Journal of Environmental Psychology (1996)

Following is the summary and literature review on some arguments proposed countering the premise of Architectural Psychology.

The authour argues that there are only two dominant kinds of architectural psychology.

01. “Dry”’ or “hard” approach - behavioristic tradition, called cognitive psychology.

02. “Soft” approach - humanistic.

Humansitic Alternatives

Roger Barker, Carl Rogers, George Kelly - these three key investigators share a humanistic orientation. Their central concern is not prediction of behaviour, but rather understanding it.

From the stand-point of “dry” psychology, it is highly questionable whether Architectural Psychology should be described as “science” at all.

Why?

Its methods are almost always qualitative; impossible to reduce to general hypotheses about the relation between people and their physical world.

Architectural Hopes & Unmet Expectations

Some architects believed that psychology would provide a firm basis for design-for-people: the view that man is a machine suggests that he can be improved by architecture-as-machine.

This thought process posed the following problems:

01. Over-emphasis on the influence of the physical environment above other influences (social group, personality, etc.);

02. Assumption that the influence of buildings is direct, and that indirect influences are negligible.

03. Typecasting people as passive, without will or choice

04. Taking for granted that the physical environment will remain unchanged over time.

Mehrabian (1976) had claimed to provide “practical tools for understanding” but the recommendations are so crippled with “mights” and “maybes” without a defintitive framework, rendering them to be quite impractical as tools for architects.