The Psychology of Architecture The Australian
June 20, 2011
Touches of red, such as those included in the Challenger workplace, Sydney, by BVN Architecture, have been found to increase workers' attention to detail. Source: Supplied For thousands of years, people have talked about architecture in terms of aesthetics. Today, it turns out, the real cutting edge has to do with the psychology of buildings, not just their appearance. Recently, scientists have begun to focus on how architecture and design can influence our moods, thoughts and health. They’ve discovered that everything – from the quality of a view to the height of a ceiling, from the wall colour to the furniture – shapes the way we think. Recently, for example, researchers at Ohio State University and the US National Institute of Mental Health tracked 60 white-collar workers at a government facility.
Some had been randomly assigned to an old office building, with low ceilings and loud air-conditioners. The rest got to work in a recently renovated space filled with skylights and open cubicles. For the next 17 months, the scientists tracked various metrics of emotional well-being. They discovered that people working in the older building were significantly more stressed, even when they weren’t at work. But spaces can also help us to be more creative and attentive. In 2009, psychologists at the University of British Columbia studied how the colour of a background affects the performance of a variety of mental tasks. They tested 600 subjects when surrounded by red, blue or neutral colours. The differences were striking. Subjects tested in the red environments were much better at skills that required accuracy and attention to detail, such as catching spelling mistakes. Though people in the blue group performed worse on short-term memory tasks, they generated twice as many “creative outputs” as subjects in the red one. Why? According to the scientists, the colour blue automatically triggers associations with openness and sky, while red makes us think of danger and stop signs. In 2006, Joan Meyers-Levy, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota’s school of management, studied the relationship between ceiling height and thinking style. She demonstrated that, when people are in a high-ceilinged room, they’re significantly better at seeing connections between seemingly unrelated subjects. Although we’re only starting to grasp how the insides of buildings influence the insides of the mind, it’s possible to begin prescribing different kinds of spaces for different tasks.
Copyright 2011 News Limited. “The Psychology of Architecture.” The Australian. June 20, 2011. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/the-psychology-of-architecture/story-e6frgabx-1226078411353
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