research in architecture

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AIA is empowering architects to use and engage in research to advance their firm, profession, and industry. Our research action plan includes increased investment, content prioritization from schools to firms, and improved dissemination.

AIA research goal

In a period of profound social, technological, and environmental shifts, the built environment must respond to the changing conditions facing communities, organizations, and individuals in ways that enhance human experience and well-being, minimize costs, maximize efficiency, optimize resources, and enhance quality of life.

Buildings in the United States are tremendously impactful, contributing a significant share of GDP. Architects play a critical role in the outcome of these buildings, which affect all levels of scale—from the individual to larger society. Yet the research available for study of architecture and buildings is disproportionate to its impact.

AIA is calling for:

• Increased investment through new and expanded funding, both private and public.
• Prioritize research within the architect core competencies and firm culture.
• Continue and expand dissemination of research and promote exchange of findings, as well as increase research literacy.

Our action plan

Increased investment.

We assert that research related to the built environment is underfunded considering its impact on the economy, human condition, and society at large. Architectural research is even more poorly funded.

• We will work to expand eligibility for government research grants related to including architects in research teams and/or directly funded.
• We believe industry and manufacturers should consult and engage architects in new product development and research and development efforts.
• We will enable possibilities for practicing architects to engage in relationships with academia, engage in research collaborations, and expand influence with other disciplines and industry.

Research content prioritization

AIA is committed to advancing research literacy in the profession. To do that in an impactful way, the commitment to research must extend from school all the way through practice and academic research. It is imperative that architects embrace research—both as critical consumers and, as warranted by interest and additional training, as researchers themselves. We will work to understand firm culture and provide guidance on how to adapt to changing integration of research into practice—however that is defined for a firm.

Improved dissemination

We are committed to making research more broadly available, connecting architects to where research resides.

• In its resources, AIA links to credible, vetted research. We encourage the same sharing and transparency throughout the profession.
• We are committed to helping develop consistent and useful approaches for post-occupancy evaluations, case studies, and key metrics. The AIA Knowledge Communities make contribution to research advancing the profession.
• We will continue to advance efforts to advance research literacy so that more architects can consume research within their workflows.

Explore architectural research

The AIA Upjohn Research Initiative and the AIA College of Fellows Latrobe Prize award funding to research that enhances the value of design and professional practice knowledge.

Our research agenda prioritizes research on the impact of architecture and the architectural profession beyond buildings. 

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Architecture articles from across Nature Portfolio

Latest research and reviews.

Microbial deterioration and sustainable conservation of stone monuments and buildings

Biodeterioration of stone monuments and buildings can lead to a loss of world cultural heritage. This Review discusses the role of microbes in the deterioration processes, the biochemical mechanisms involved and possible strategies for sustainable conservation of stone monuments and buildings.

• Robert J. Koestler

Monumental architecture at Aguada Fénix and the rise of Maya civilization

Lidar survey of the Maya lowlands uncovers the monumental site of Aguada Fénix, which dates to around 1000–800  bc and points to the role of communal construction in the development of Maya civilization.

• Takeshi Inomata
• Daniela Triadan

In situ structural analysis of the human nuclear pore complex

The most comprehensive architectural model to date of the nuclear pore complex reveals previously unknown local interactions, and a role for nucleoporin 358 in Y-complex oligomerization.

• Alexander von Appen
• Jan Kosinski
• Martin Beck

News and Comment

From the archive: Mendelian inheritance, and an enigmatic echo

Snippets from Nature ’s past.

Cool shadings

• Giulia Tregnago

From the archive: the tenacity of eels, and weatherproofing St Paul’s

World’s first house made with nappy-blended concrete

The challenge for the hybrid material is more one of logistics than compressive strength.

• Elissa Welle

Syria after the earthquakes: what researchers can do to help

Equipment and expert aid are urgently needed for 4.7 million people in the country’s neglected northwest.

Turkey–Syria earthquake: what scientists know

Turkey and Syria’s buildings have always been vulnerable to earthquakes, but war has made things worse.

• Miryam Naddaf

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Research The role of research at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design is to produce new forms of knowledge.

These forms can be expressed in a variety of ways: from the design of spaces, objects, buildings, urban environments, urban strategy, and images, to a carefully curated exhibition or the writing of a compelling story or scholarly text.

As a Tier 1 public research university, our permanent faculty bring their ongoing research agenda to the context of teaching through advanced-level work. Our collective research interests are diverse and international in their focus, but we often engage city departments and officials around issues impacting the growth of Los Angeles as a case study for a rapidly evolving urban metropolis. While the format of this work can vary, we train future architects and scholars to seek, shape and produce new forms of knowledge in their respective fields.

Research at AUD takes three essential shapes: current endeavors and programming that connect AUD with external partners and colleagues; research conducted via our curriculum and especially our year-long Research Studios; and research led via our Research Centers.

Current Research in Focus

Wildfire workshops: a coordination & conservation plan for high-risk la neighborhoods.

UCLA AUD is working on this effort in conjunction with the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) and other first-response agencies.

A series of collaborative, inclusive workshops over the course of 2024 will encourage residents to share their concerns, an effort to engage public dialogue toward a thorough understanding of the vulnerabilities that communities face with potential wildfires in their neighborhoods. The first workshop is held on April 27, 2024 at AUD's Perloff Hall, with registration and more information available via the project website .

Based on the information collected during its 2024 workshops, the UCLA AUD team will prepare recommendations to improve public safety, property protection, and agencies’ responses for residents living in the Santa Monica Mountains Wildland Urban Interface.

In recent years, UCLA AUD has devoted various research endeavors to climate risk and resilience, with wildfire as one area of particular interest. AUD's Hitoshi Abe and Jeffrey Inaba , alongside Abe's international think tank xLAB , have led a series of research studios under the umbrella "FireLand/FireCity." Among other efforts, this research led to a publication examining the historical and future relationship between the built environment and California wildfires.

Learn more below via "Further Reading"

Participate: UCLA AUD Wildfire Workshops at Perloff Hall and Beyond

Your valuable insights and ideas are essential to safeguarding our homes, preserving our natural surroundings, and strengthening the resilience of the communities in the Santa Monica Mountains.

These sessions will provide an extraordinary opportunity for residents, city departments, urban planners, and other stakeholders to collaborate, identify pressing issues, and collectively develop sustainable solutions. By joining forces, we can forge a path toward a safer and more prepared LA, united in our commitment to protecting our community from the devastating effects of fires.

There will be a series of assemblies, each focusing on the Bel Air community in the Santa Monica Mountains. The last workshop will be held at the UCLA campus, encouraging all of the communities to participate in a general assembly.

Below you will find the location, time and date of each assembly, which community it is geared towards and some of the topics that will be discussed.

APRIL 2024: Assembly #1 at UCLA AUD's Perloff Hall April 27, 2024 Perloff Hall Decafe Specific time TBD

MAY 2024: Assembly #2 Mandeville, Brentwood, Mountain Gate, Encino Collect input from residents & emergency agencies

JUNE 2024: Assembly #3 Tarzana, Woodland Hills, Pacific Palisades, Topanga Collect input from residents & emergency agencies

JULY 2024: Assembly #4 Present findings; input from policymakers & planners; resident and agency feedback

OCTOBER 2024: Recommendations shared online & in print Wildfire resilience through land conservation, management, and sensible development

Research Studios

At a public research university like ucla, new knowledge is a constant pursuit..

AUD's curriculum fosters both research itself, as well as the tools and perspectives that enable the lifelong pursuit of insight and discovery.

Each of our academic programs brings both the spirit and the act of research into their respective curricula. MArch students each take on a year-long Research Studio in their third year of study; therein, they focus their design skills and interests on a substantial, capstone-style project or topic of inquiry. The MSAUD program engages research to question, challenge, and expand the current conventions of architectural practice. For our MA and PhD programs, research is simultaneously purpose, method, and outcome, as students pursue scholarship that aims to provoke and operate within architecture’s public, professional, and scholarly constituencies.

Our course descriptions ( current and historical ) offer portal into the different questions, topics, and interests that animate our research and propel our pursuit of new knowledge and ways of designing.

Research Studio in Focus: Julia Koerner's 2022-2023 studio "Fit for the Future: 3D-Printed Sustainable Building Skins"

Today, age-old questions about aging infrastructure are complicated by the climate crisis: threats like rising, warming seas, or wildfires and extreme heat, call for innovation in how we design our buildings and cities. And, while architects mull these questions, they are also considering their field's contributions to the climate crisis–emissions and carbon footprints, material waste, environmental displacement.

Dilemmas abound, but AUD's Julia Koerner sees immense opportunity around 3D printing at the scale of buildings and houses. It’s an area she has been investigating for years as a professor, architect, researcher, and designer.

Koerner has grown especially interested in training 3D-printing technology to “learn” from nature’s patterns and structures–the logic behind these patterns’ intricacy, the functional outcomes that have enabled some plants and animals to survive for millennia, and their aesthetic beauty. Koerner recently was awarded Honorable Mention in ICON's Initiative 99 competition, with a proposal inspired by cacti

Koerner brought these threads together for her AUD research studio “Fit for the Future: 3D Printed Sustainable Building Skins.” Over the course of the 2022-2023 academic year, twelve students investigated emerging 3D-printing technology and questioned how this innovation, combined with sustainable building materials and methods, may create risk-resilient architecture for the 21st century–architecture that mimics the natural world’s resilience, adaptability, and beauty.

The studio’s proposals gesture toward both tangible, immediate solutions as well as promising research directions and new questions for architecture’s near future.

“The path towards a sustainable future requires a transition from the current linear, extractive, toxic construction practices, towards circular, bio-based, renewable materials and methods,” Koerner says. “We have this current opportunity to really think these questions through, and shape not just new buildings but new systems and approaches to building, to materials, to construction, and to performance.”

Read more: Fit for the Future Studio in focus

Research Centers

One of the avenues through which ucla aud accelerates research is its research centers..

AUD currently has two: cityLAB-UCLA co-founded by Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman , and directed by Dana Cuff, and xLAB founded and directed by Hitoshi Abe . Depending on grant funding secured each year by individual faculty members, students have the opportunity to apply for student researcher positions to support these creative and scholarly efforts.

cityLAB-UCLA

cityLAB-UCLA leverages architecture, planning, and design, to address the most critical urban issues facing our cities today. cityLAB recently capped a 10-year effort to double the density of Los Angeles through the design of backyard homes. By co-authoring Accessory Dwelling Unit legislation (AB 229/SB 1069), we doubled the density of California, creating thousands of small residential jobs for architects and builders. In 2019, cityLAB followed up with a study about technology’s role in meeting the growing demand for backyard homes, and creative new approaches to ADU design-finance-build.

CITYLAB.UCLA.EDU

xLAB is an international think tank initiative that examines architecture’s elastic boundaries and considers new possibilities through interdisciplinary collaboration in the study of the future built environment. xLAB encourages partnerships with a range of industries-including business, technology and science-creating a vast network of possibilities that expands architecture’s role and potential to serve as an active platform in which to “Research, Test, Share” ideas between fields, people, and places.

xlab.aud.ucla.edu

Urban Humanities Institute

The UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative (UHI) is a cross-disciplinary teaching and research initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, based within cityLAB-UCLA. UHI integrates the interpretive, historical approaches of the humanities with the material, projective practices of design, to document, elucidate, and transform the cultural object we call the city. Architecture, urban studies, and humanities students are the heart of the program, and over 150 students have completed the year-long Graduate Certificate in Urban Humanities.

URBANHUMANITIES.UCLA.EDU

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Architectural Research: The Latest Architecture and News

Jingru (cyan) cheng wins 2023 wheelwright prize for her study on the impact of sand on the environment and communities.

Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) has announced Jingru (Cyan) Cheng as the recipient of the 2023 Wheelwright Prize , a study grant created to support globally-minded research and investigative approaches to contemporary architecture. The winning research project, titled “Tracing Sand: Phantom Territories, Bodies Adrift,” delves into the multifaceted impacts of sand mining and reclamation, understood from cultural, economic, and ecological perspectives. The unassuming material has become an indispensable element for our built environment and human communities, serving as a vital component in the production of glass, concrete, asphalt roads, and artificial land. Yet the process of dredging underwater systems and sand mining leads to the disruption of habitats in a process that simultaneously shapes one habitat while devastating another.

• Read more »

Design for Inclusivity at the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023

The UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 is an invitation for architects from around the world to meet in Copenhagen July 2 – 6 to explore and communicate how architecture influences all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For more than two years, the Science Track and its international Scientific Committee have been analyzing the various ways in which architecture responds to the SDGs. The work has resulted in the formulation of six science panels: design for Climate Adaptation , design for Rethinking Resources , design for Resilient Communities , design for Health , design for Inclusivity , and design for Partnerships for Change. An international call for papers was sent out in 2022 and 296 of more than 750 submissions from 77 countries have been invited to present at the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 in Copenhagen. ArchDaily is collaborating with the UIA to share articles pertaining to the six themes to prepare for the opening of the Congress.

In this fifth feature, we met with co-chairs of design for Inclusivity architect Magda Mostafa , Professor of Design, Department of Architecture , the American University in Cairo and architect Ruth Baumeister , Associate Professor of Theory and History, Aarhus School of Architecture.

Design for Health at the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023

In this fourth feature, we met with co-chairs of design for Health architect Arif Hasan , former Visiting Professor NED University Karachi and member of UNs Advisory Group on Forced Evictions, and architect Christian Benimana , Senior Principal and Co-Executive Director at MASS Design Group

Design for Resilient Communities at the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023

In this third feature, we met with co-chairs of Design for Resilient Communities Anna Rubbo , Senior Researcher, Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD), The Climate School, Columbia University, and Juan Du , Professor and Dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture , Landscape and Design, University of Toronto.

Rethinking Resources at the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023

The UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 is an invitation for architects from around the world to meet in Copenhagen July 2 – 6 to explore and communicate how architecture influences all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For more than two years, the Science Track and its international Scientific Committee have been analyzing the various ways in which architecture responds to the SDGs. The work has resulted in the formulation of six science panels: design for Climate Adaptation , design for Rethinking Resources , design for Resilient Communities , design for Health , design for Inclusivity , and design for Partnerships for Change. An international call for papers was sent out in 2022 and 296 of more than 750 submissions have been invited to present at the UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 in Copenhagen. ArchDaily is collaborating with the UIA to share articles pertaining to the six themes to prepare for the opening of the Congress.

In this first feature, we met with the Head of the Scientific Committee Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen , Professor and Head of the CITA (Centre for IT and Architecture), Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture , Design and Conservation who is also co-chairing the panel design for Rethinking Resources with Carlo Ratti, Professor and Director of the Senseable Lab, MIT, Founding Partner of CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati .

The UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 Copenhagen Science Track Announces the 6 Themes of Its Agenda

The UIA World Congress of Architects 2023 is an invitation for architects from all around the world to meet in Copenhagen to explore and communicate how architecture influences all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Science Track of the UIA World Congress has been tasked with the development of the agenda, Sustainable Futures – Leave No One Behind . For more than two years, its international Scientific Committee has been analyzing the various ways in which architecture responds to the SDGs. The work has resulted in the formulation of six themes: climate adaptation, rethinking resources, resilient communities, health, inclusivity, and partnerships for change. ArchDaily is collaborating with UIA to share articles pertaining to the six themes to prepare for the opening of the Congress on July 2, 2023.

“Everyone Belongs to Everyone Else”: The Italian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale is Curated by Fosbury Architecture

The project for the Italian Pavilion at the 18 th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia will be curated by Fosbury Architecture , a collective composed of Giacomo Ardesio, Alessandro Bonizzoni, Nicola Campri, Veronica Caprino, and Claudia Mainardi. Fosbury Architecture’s vision for the exhibition is based on a research practice that sees design as the result of collective and collaborative work. From January to April, leading up to the opening of the Biennale, nine site-specific interventions titled “ Spaziale presenta ” are set out to activate different locations across Italy.

"With Intention to Build", Moshe Safdie’s Exhibition of Unbuilt Projects Opens in Boston, USA

From October 2022 through January 2, 2023, The Boston Architectural College (BAC) and Safdie Architects will display the most groundbreaking unbuilt projects by Moshe Safdie . With Intention to Build showcases the architect's creative process throughout the 55 years of his career, including models, drawings, and various texts and photographs. The exhibition provides context and tells the story behind these radical unrealized designs that have influenced projects such as Habitat 67 in Montreal, Canada , and Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.

The 3rd Lilly Reich Grant for Equality in Architecture is Awarded to a Research Project Celebrating Anna Bofill Levi

Fundació Mies van der Rohe has announced that a research project focused on Anna Bofill Levi has been awarded the third Lilly Reich Grant for Equality in Architecture . The project, titled “ La arquitectura como contracanto: 1977-1996 ”, was initiated by architects Ma Elia Gutiérrez Mozo , José Parra Martínez , Ana Gilsanz Díaz , and Joaquín Arnau Amo . The research contextualizes the architectural works of pianist, architect, and composer Anna Bofill Levi and brings into focus the result of her multidisciplinary approach, intertwining practices and research in design, architecture and music.

A City of Rooms: An Analysis of Shared Housing and Domestic Living

"A city of rooms" is a research work by architect Paula Olea Fonti that focuses on the study of shared housing, which is one of the most common ways for young students and professionals to live in the city. A popular and ordinary house, if you will. One that many architects would distinguish for its low architectural value.

The Architect-Researcher: Exploring New Possibilities for the Production of Architecture

While research seems intrinsic to the design process, architectural research is a professional path in itself, whose purpose is to highlight scientific evidence and explore alternatives outside of pre-established norms or empirical considerations. Its purpose is to create a framework of knowledge that can inform the design to reach objectively better outcomes. The following discusses the role and state of research in architecture, some prominent areas of inquiry, and the architects or institutions that dedicate their work to these subjects.

RIBA Announces Winners of 2021 President’s Medal and Awards for Research

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced the winners of the 2021 President's Medal and Awards for Research , highlighting the best research concerning architecture and the built environment. The President's Medal was awarded to John Lin and Sony Devabhaktuni from the University of Hong Kong for their research project As Found Houses , which explores vernacular practices in rural China . Two more awards were granted to the development of an ethics guide for architectural practitioners and a study of thin-tile vaulting in Cuba.

Between Arches, Architecture of Connection: An Alternative View of Barcelona

The gaze is a tool that the architect uses constantly but does not fully value. It is an instrument that, in addition to allowing us to know and recognize our reality and the phenomena that arise from it, can work as a method of analysis. " Entrearcos (Between-arches): architecture of connection " is a research project developed by the architect Daniela Silva Landeros that studies, in the specific case of the Ciutat Vella neighbourhood of the city of Barcelona , the issue of arches in our cities. And Silva Landeros does so from alternative points of view that call into question the way we are used to looking.

Systematica Releases First Assessment on Milan Public Realm, Green Areas and Gathering Places

Systematica has just released a case study on access to green areas and the public realm in the city of Milan . Focusing on the availability of these gathering spaces for residents, the research, particularly relevant in this time of the pandemic, also highlights open and not crowded public spaces, convenient for a safe social life.

2020 AIANY | Center for Architecture Arnold W. Brunner Grant for Mid-Career Architects

CALL FOR ENTRIES Arnold W. Brunner Grant $15,000 Deadline: Monday, February 3rd, 2020 5 pm (EST)

The Center for Architecture is now accepting applications for the 2020 Arnold W. Brunner Grant. This grant is awarded to mid-career architects for advanced study in any area of architectural investigation that will contribute to the knowledge, teaching, or practice of the art and science of architecture. The proposed investigation is to result in a publicly available written work, design project, research paper, or other form of presentation to be offered at the Center for Architecture. Previous topics of research have ranged from the impact of American

AD Interviews: Kim Nielsen of 3XN

During the World Architecture Festival 2018, which will be held this year again in Amsterdam , we had the chance to sit down with Kim Nielsen, one of the founders of Denmark-based firm 3XN .

How To Promote Lifelong Learning, Productivity, And Meaningfulness In Architecture

With the aim of generating an architecture that incubates the wellbeing, self-realization, and fulfillment of its inhabitants to become the best version of themselves, CEBRA has launched an ambitious Research and Development Program (R&D) called WISE (Work, Innovation, Space and Education). As explained by its creators, the purpose of WISE is "to bridge the ongoing and rapid change in the sectors of workspace and education to inform the design of buildings that stimulate learning and innovation. We are connecting ideas of the foremost thinkers of education and entrepreneurship, research and studies in sensory stimuli, cognitive psychology, and behaviorism with architecture." We spoke with Carsten Primdahl , founding partner of CEBRA, and Klaudio Muca , R&D Architect at CEBRA, to better understand the approach and expected results of the program.

This World-Leading Building Researcher Believes That Architecture Is Afraid of Science

This article was originally published by Common Edge as " A Top Building Researcher Asks: Why is Architecture Afraid of Science? "

Recently we’ve written a fair amount about the state of architectural research. The general consensus appears to be that it lacks rigor and, even more importantly, is not grounded in good science. Steven J Orfield has some strong opinions about architectural research. He’s been conducting it—for architecture and design firms, as well as Fortune 500 companies—at his Minneapolis-based Orfield Laboratories for more than three decades now. Late last week I talked to him about why architects are afraid of science, how he would introduce it into the schools, and his work in the field of universal design.

EAAE Charter on Architectural Research

Update approved by the general assembly 02.09.2022.

In 2022, the EAAE Charter on Architectural Research celebrates its 10 th anniversary.  During the last years, the EAAE Research Academy organized a series of workshops about research impact, and, more recently, together with the Education Academy and Conservation Network, about the importance of SDG-s in architectural education and research.  After the adoption of the EAAE Charter on Architectural Research, architectural research diversified and the awareness of its actual social impact increased. The original text is, in general, still relevant. However, today’s situation can be reflected in an update, to effectively support architectural research policy-related endeavours. The omnipresent debates about sustainability reflect the importance of ethics, responsibility, inclusiveness, collective authorship, multifarious research and design practices, and in various contexts. The discussions have uncovered the need to reframe the role of design in architectural research as the fundamental way of thinking and process of knowledge production, addressing contemporary societal needs.

The majority of the changes are in the chapters Architectural Research, Connection to Other Disciplines and Criteria and Characteristics for Quality. A new chapter about Evidencing Research Impact is added, to reflect the actual societal role of architectural research.

The EAAE Research Academy working group thanks all the contributors to the EAAE Charter on Architectural Research 2022 update!

(update 2022)

The EAAE Charter on Architectural Research is intended as a reference document for the use of universities, architecture schools and research institutions, but also funding agencies, governmental bodies, professional bodies and architectural practices that are undertaking, evaluating and financing architectural research. It specifies the character and objectives of architectural research, confirms the variety of valid methodologies and supports the development of a vibrant, internationally recognized and well-funded research community.

Architecture as a Discipline and a Field of Knowledge

Architecture is the discipline devoted to the creation, transformation and interpretation of the built environment and the articulation of space at various scales. It involves art, science, design, conservation, planning, management, construction and representation. The discipline of architecture engages with the cultural, ethical, aesthetic, socio-economic, and environmental conditions affecting our quality of life.

Architecture is facing challenges of climate crisis, globalization, urbanization and social transformation that necessitate vital research. In parallel, the horizons of architectural experimentation are expanding rapidly with the development of new technologies and media. If we are to understand, explain, anticipate and influence the consequences of these changes, research is essential. Moreover, research is essential for the continued expansion of the discipline’s knowledge base, the development of spatial understandings, and the improvement in teaching, learning and practice of architecture.

Architectural Research

Architectural research is an original investigation undertaken in order to generate knowledge, insights and understanding based on competencies, methods and tools proper to the discipline of architecture. It has its own particular knowledge base, mode, scope, tactics and strategies.

In architectural research, design is the fundamental way of thinking and process of knowledge production. It generates critical inquiry and advanced synthesis through design work.

The process of designing, which constitutes the essence of architecture, is from its very nature creative in the original sense of “bringing forward” tangible and intangible matters. In this process, factual and methodological knowledge, both experienced/tested and experimental/intuitive, are applied to specific questions and aspects, problems concerning human activities and the physical and virtual realm where they take place, aiming at reaching innovative solutions mostly in the form of physical and virtual entities.

This process may often seem “chaotic” in the sense of “unstructured” or even “random” – and sometimes is. However, this is a self-reflective, iterative process where the findings of these seemingly “random” actions are again and again critically questioned and contextualized.

Furthermore, there is a strong element of structured knowledge production through research and development in a design process. In this sense, the strength of designing as a scientific and artistic research method lies in applying experimentation and variation to solving concrete problems and choosing the preferred solution founded case-based on criteria both rational and communicable.

Moreover, research in architecture encompasses knowledge production through design projects, artefacts and design processes, as well as research about and for design. Therefore research results may be obtained by, and consistent with experience in practice.

Connection to Other Disciplines

Although architecture has its own corpus of specific knowledge, it needs to engage with other disciplines to create new knowledge and synthesis.  In that interaction, architects contribute their ability to act in complex- non-reductive particular environments. By embracing aspects of rationality and intuition, objectivity and inter-subjectivity, technique and emotion, logic and creativity, architectural research enriches the understanding of the world. Architectural research is therefore fertile for trans- and inter-disciplinary endeavors and forms an essential part of these endeavours.

Architectural research takes place in a broad societal and cultural context, connecting academy, practice, and continuing education. A clarification of this position is necessary, stimulating stronger links between (and intertwinement of) theoretical and practice-based research and between academic and professional arenas.

By its nature, architecture also connects to a variety of industries, including the cultural sector, the construction sector, the environmental sector, the public, private and social sectors. Moreover, architecture has its own industry which is professional practice. Much of the most innovative and relevant architectural research inevitably emerges from and contributes to this industry of professional practice.

Architectural Research and Education

In academia and practice, architectural research supports education both directly, through research training of future architects, and indirectly, by providing for the continual advancement of the discipline.

The aim of architectural higher education is to develop a research disposition in students. As future architects, they need to be able to establish basic premises, perform critical analysis, conduct intensive research and propose syntheses independently.

The architectural school as a whole and the design studio, in particular, are places for research par excellence.

Peer review, communication and international dissemination are crucial and should relate to the nature of the research.

Valid architectural research outputs are as varied as the constantly growing range of research approaches. It includes installations, experimental projects, design proposals, models and actual buildings as such, in addition to written and graphic research outputs.

Criteria and Characteristics for Quality

Architectural research meets the general criteria of originality, significance, and rigour. It produces forms of output and discourse proper to disciplinary practice, to make it discussable, communicable and useful to relevant audiences. It is validated through panels of experts who collectively cover the range of disciplinary competencies addressed by the work.

These criteria guide architectural research to a high level of quality and open up new horizons:

• the research is meaningful and relevant for design practices, for the discipline, for society, for culture; it explores limits and expands them;
• it contributes to design practices, it originality emerges from the exploration of spatial understanding and/or the creative design process;
• the research endeavors to make its processes and foundations as consistent, clear and explicit as possible;
• method, context, process and results are communicated and submitted to regular peer review and the research insights shared effectively; thesis and results are contextualized with the relevant discourses, work and literature to explicate the original and relevant contribution of the research;
• it creates and exploits trans-disciplinary connections.

Evidencing Research Impact

Architectural research impacts multifarious audiences: individuals, groups and institutions. It affects local, regional, national and/or global scales, in different research areas and timeframes, which requires strategic timing of impact-making and assessment. The nature of impact, as well as the ways of measuring it, depends on the audiences, areas and contexts in which it is accessible, effective and engaging.  The EAAE advocates expanding the scope of impact assessment indicators and including referential bodies of evidence such as: curation, community engagement, public presentations, practice recognition by peers, scholars and stakeholders (awards), funding and publications.

Ethicality requires the researcher to adopt a posture that manifests integrity, tolerance, acceptance of difference, and honesty regarding the participants in and the subject of research. Respect for existing ethical codes and for the freedom of researchers is fundamental. Architectural research must take into account its direct impact on culture, society and the world’s ecosystem.

Funding policies need to be structured in accordance with the variety of modes, scope and contexts of architectural research.

To guarantee ethical integrity architectural research must have adequate financing: a variable combination of public and private financing, depending on the research aims.

For these reasons besides existing short-term financing, a solid basis is needed for assuring continuity of the research and its long-term quality.

Research and Practice Linked

The EAAE advocates stronger links between theoretical and practice-based research, and therefore between academia and the profession for the establishment of an expanded arena of architectural research.

Original version approved by the EAAE General Assembly, Chania, 03 September 2012. (Amended version approved by the EAAE General Assembly, Madrid 2022).

(version 2012)

The EAAE Charter on Architectural Research is intended as a reference document for the use of universities, architecture schools, research institutions, funding agencies, professional bodies and architectural practices that are undertaking architectural research. It specifies the character and objectives of architectural research, confirms the variety of valid methodologies and supports the development of a vibrant, internationally recognized and well-funded research community.

Architecture is the discipline devoted to the creation, transformation and interpretation of the built environment and the articulation of space at various scales. It involves art, science, design, conservation, planning, management, construction and representation, addressing issues of ethics, aesthetics, culture and society. The discipline of architecture engages with the cultural, socio-economic and environmental conditions affecting our quality of life.

Architecture is facing challenges of climate change, globalization, urbanization and social transformation that necessitate vital research. In parallel, the horizons of architectural experimentation are expanding rapidly with the development of new technologies and media. If we are to understand, explain, anticipate and influence the consequences of these changes, research is essential. Moreover, research is essential for the continued expansion of the discipline’s knowledge base, the development of spatial understandings, and the improvement in teaching, learning and practice of architecture.

Architectural research is original investigation undertaken in order to generate knowledge, insights and understanding based on competencies, methods and tools proper to the discipline of architecture. It has its own particular knowledge base, mode, scope, tactics and strategies.

Research by Design

In architecture, design is the essential feature. Any kind of inquiry in which design is the substantial constituent of the research process is referred to as research by design.

In research by design, the architectural design process forms the pathway through which new insights, knowledge, practices or products come into being. It generates critical inquiry through design work. Therefore research results are obtained by, and consistent with experience in practice.

Architecture reaches out to and incorporates knowledge of other disciplines. Architectural research therefore is fertile for trans- and inter-disciplinary endeavours.

By embracing aspects of rationality and intuition, objectivity and inter-subjectivity, technique and emotion, logic and creativity, architectural research enriches the understanding of the world.

Architectural research takes place in a broad societal and cultural context, connecting academy, practice, and continuing education. A clarification of this position is necessary, stimulating stronger links between theoretical and practice-based research and between academic and professional arenas.

By its nature, architecture also connects to a variety of industries, including the cultural sector, the construction sector, the environmental sector, the public, private and social sectors. Moreover,

architecture has its own industry which is professional practice. Much of the most innovative and relevant architectural research inevitably emerges from and contributes to this industry of professional practice.

Students in architecture are taught at the highest level of academic education. The aim of architectural higher education is to develop a research disposition in students. As future architects they need to be able to establish basic premises, perform critical analysis, conduct intensive research and propose syntheses independently.

The architectural school as a whole and the design studio in particular are places for research practice par excellence.

Architectural research meets the general criteria of originality, significance, and rigour. It produces forms of output and discourse proper to disciplinary practice, to make it discussable, communicable and useful to peers and others. It is validated through panels of experts who collectively cover the range of disciplinary competencies addressed by the work.

The following characteristics could guide architectural research to a high level of quality and open up new horizons:

• the research is meaningful and relevant for practice, for the discipline, and for society; it explores limits and expands them;
• it contributes to design practice, to the exploration of spatial understanding and/or the creative design process;
• it contributes to knowledge through intellectual work that is characteristic of architecture and design practice;
• the results are consistent with experience in practice;
• the research endeavors to make its processes and foundations as clear and explicit as possible;
• method, context, process and results are communicated and submitted to regular peer review; they refer to the work of peers;
• the research explores emotional, intuitive and/or artistic aspects of the domain, it engages architectural competences and experience in practice;

Ethicality requires the researcher to adopt a posture that manifests integrity, tolerance, acceptance of difference, and honesty regarding the participants in and the subject of research. Respect for existing ethical codes and for the freedom of researchers is fundamental. Architectural research must take into account its direct impact on society and nature.

To guarantee ethical integrity architectural research must have adequate financing: a variable combination of public and private financing, depending on the aims of the research.

For these reasons besides existing short-term financing, a solid basis is needed for assuring a continuity of the research and its long-term quality.

NOTE: Approved by the EAAE General Assembly, Chania, 03 September 2012.

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Review article, the embodiment of architectural experience: a methodological perspective on neuro-architecture.

• 1 Biological Psychology and Neuroergonomics, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
• 2 Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

People spend a large portion of their time inside built environments. Research in neuro-architecture—the neural basis of human perception of and interaction with the surrounding architecture—promises to advance our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying this common human experience and also to inspire evidence-based architectural design principles. This article examines the current state of the field and offers a path for moving closer to fulfilling this promise. The paper is structured in three sections, beginning with an introduction to neuro-architecture, outlining its main objectives and giving an overview of experimental research in the field. Afterward, two methodological limitations attending current brain-imaging architectural research are discussed: the first concerns the limited focus of the research, which is often restricted to the aesthetic dimension of architectural experience; the second concerns practical limitations imposed by the typical experimental tools and methods, which often require participants to remain stationary and prevent naturalistic interaction with architectural surroundings. Next, we propose that the theoretical basis of ecological psychology provides a framework for addressing these limitations and motivates emphasizing the role of embodied exploration in architectural experience, which encompasses but is not limited to aesthetic contemplation. In this section, some basic concepts within ecological psychology and their convergences with architecture are described. Lastly, we introduce Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) as one emerging brain imaging approach with the potential to improve the ecological validity of neuro-architecture research. Accordingly, we suggest that combining theoretical and conceptual resources from ecological psychology with state-of-the-art neuroscience methods (Mobile Brain/Body Imaging) is a promising way to bring neuro-architecture closer to accomplishing its scientific and practical goals.

A Brief Introduction: From Pre-Neuro-Architecture to Neuro-Architecture

Before the recent development of neuro-architecture as a research field ( Eberhard and Gage, 2003 ; Eberhard, 2009b ; Ruiz-Arellano, 2015 ), many scholars studied psychological and behavioral effects of architectural experiences in their own way. If we consider architecture as “composed structural space,” three themes that reoccur in the history of architecture practice and theory are those of utilitas, firmitas, et venustas , or utility, strength, and beauty ( Pollio, 1914 ), even if this architectural triad has changed in balance and definition at different points in time. For instance, not only were the Egyptian pyramids a utility and structural achievement, but the spatial design decisions were based on beliefs about the passage from this world to the afterworld and the goal of inducing in visitors experiences related to the afterworld ( Fazio et al., 2008 , p. 27–33). Equally, the Greeks, who were deeply inspired by Egyptian culture ( Rutherford, 2016 ), refined their understanding of buildings expressed in their symmetrical and pillared architecture but continued to reserve special places in the city for buildings that were considered important, such as temples. Important buildings are situated in important places, which remains a common way of building today.

Throughout the history of architecture, from Byzantine, Islamic, Medieval and Romanesque eras to Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque architecture, the conception of architecture continuously approximated a powerful spiritual status ( Fazio et al., 2008 , p. 1–7). Dominating cities and important religious buildings, including churches, temples, and mosques, were carefully designed according to cultural beliefs. The implicit agreement, throughout history, seems to be that architecture, through its utility, strength, and beauty, affects the human perceiver beyond the ordinary, material world as we know it because it affects the soul and mind ( Stendhal, 2010 ). The relation between divinity and architecture was also expressed by applying the laws of nature in spatial ratios and proportions expressed both through the facades and the plan of buildings [see e.g., Palladio (1965) ]. At any rate, although design decisions about the spatial structures had for a long time been guided by metaphysical views about how the space affects the perceiver, in the nineteenth century this came to change as religion, science and technology became more independent cultural forces.

With technological advancements, such as reinforced concrete, architects began exploring how beauty emerged from the structure and utility of the building itself ( Frascari, 1983 ; Frampton, 1985 ; Corbusier, 2013 ). Open spaces with wide-spanning beams and few structural elements commenced a turn toward the performance of the building. Statements of influential architects point to the importance of functionality for architectural design, such as Louis Sullivan 1 , Mies van der Rohe 2 , or Augustus Pugin 3 . Modern architecture has developed into an interdisciplinary field, taking advantage of the experience of other areas of science, and especially ergonomics has increasingly been reflected in modern architecture ( Charytonowicz, 2000 ).

Modernism made one of its marks through the famous 1910 essay by Loos (2019) in which he describes how ornamentation and art had no function and were thus redundant. In European building culture, it became customary for those influenced by these ideas to see any artistic addition or ornamentation to the interior of spaces or the exterior of buildings as superfluous and to be avoided. Instead, the focus was reoriented toward the building performance, e.g., increased window sizes, bigger open spaces, rethinking city infrastructure according to means of transportation, etc. Architects would optimize the building for its conceptual function and consequently base their design decisions on how well the building would perform. The users of the building, on the other hand, have been reduced to a matter of physical proportions ( Corbusier, 1954 ) associated with a series of assumptions on psychological and behavioral impact.

The pre-neuro-architecture belief that spatial configurations alter psychological and behavioral outcomes is clear throughout history. Designing the world meant to design human lives (including their afterlife according to the ancient Egyptians). Yet, exactly how the designed environment affects our lives remains uncovered and typically inaccessible in the writings of architects and architectural scholars. It is not the question of why we place important buildings in important places in the cities, but why we consider places to be important to begin with. If it is due to its visual exposure from within as well as from exterior vantage points, then we must acknowledge that it is based on the properties of human perception. This is precisely where neuro-architecture comes in.

Neuro-Architecture Definition and Objectives

Neuro-architecture can be seen as an emerging field that combines neuroscience, environmental psychology, and architecture to focus on human brain dynamics resulting from action in and interaction with the built environment ( Karakas and Yildiz, 2020 ). Some scholars also describe neuro-architecture as a field where architects collaborate with neuroscientists to scientifically explore the relationship between individuals and their surrounding environment ( Ezzat Ahmed and Kamel, 2021 ). Regarding the rise of this discipline, the necessity of convergence among architects and neuroscientists was first mentioned in 2003 in an interview with Eberhard and Gage (2003 ; see also Azzazy et al., 2021 ). In that year, the first academic organization focusing on neuro-architecture was formed, the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA; Ruiz-Arellano, 2015 ).

According to Azzazy et al. (2021) , the main objective of neuro-architecture is to study the impact of the architectural environment on the neural system. Based on the understanding of how the brain perceives its surroundings, neuroscience can improve the design process, design strategies, and inform regulations that eventually improve human health and well-being in the future ( Eberhard, 2009b ; Dougherty and Arbib, 2013 ; Azzazy et al., 2021 ). One of the primary foci of this framework is to investigate peoples’ experiences in various contexts, such as the role of office space design in the reduction of stress and increase in productivity, how the design of hospital rooms enhances the recovery of patients, or how the design of churches increases the sense of awe and inspiration.

Overview of Research Paradigms and Methods in Neuro-Architecture

With the continuous development of new brain imaging technologies and new experimental paradigms over the last decades, recent neuro-architectural studies have become increasingly sophisticated. The studies can be roughly divided into two categories that either require participants to remain motionless (stationary paradigms) or that allow physical interaction with the environment (mobile paradigms). Stationary neuroimaging protocols present participants with static visual stimuli of architectural environments while they are sitting in a well-controlled laboratory or while lying in a scanner. Stationary imaging methods like magnetoencephalography (MEG), electroencephalography (EEG), or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can reveal the neural basis of statically experiencing the built environment. While the experimental control of stationary architectural studies is often high, the ecological validity is usually low as only two-dimensional snapshots of complex three-dimensional environments are presented that do not allow any kind of interaction with the perceived environment. Mobile protocols, in contrast, allow participants to actively experience real or virtual three-dimensional artifacts with high ecological validity, at the cost of introducing noise to the recordings due to uncontrollable environments and movement-related artifacts in the few select imaging methods that are portable ( Gramann et al., 2021 ). Thus, while stationary protocols allow for experimental control they might not be able to measure the neural aspects of humans perceiving and interacting with the built environment, rendering mobile brain imaging methods an important tool to gain deeper insights into the impact of architecture on the human experience and behavior. Together, results from both stationary and mobile brain imaging approaches can complement each other and contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the human brain. Several studies using stationary protocols provided first important insights into the relationship of architectural design and human brain responses. These will be introduced in the next section.

Neuro-Architecture Research Methods, Findings and Limitations

Previous studies in neuro-architecture.

Most existing neuro-architectural studies are based on stationary protocols with participants focusing on visual stimuli while being seated or lying down to measure the subjective experience of architectural aesthetics. Investigating event-related potentials (ERP) of the EEG, Oppenheim et al. (2009 , 2010) found that buildings that rank high regarding their social status as they are designed to be more important (like government buildings) or sublime (like religious buildings) have more impact on the perception of sublimity than low-ranking buildings (such as buildings associated with economy or the private life). In these studies, the hippocampus was shown to contribute to the processing of architectural ranking. Other studies discovered that participants perceived curvilinear spaces as more beautiful than rectilinear ones ( Vartanian et al., 2013 ). Using fMRI, the authors explored the neural mechanism behind this phenomenon and found that when participants made approach-avoidance decisions, images of curvilinear architectural interiors activated the lingual and the calcarine gyrus in the visual cortex more than images of rectilinear interiors. When contemplating beauty, curvilinear contours activated the anterior cingulate cortex exclusively ( Vartanian et al., 2013 ). Using the same fMRI dataset, Vartanian et al. (2015) also examined the effects of ceiling height and perceived enclosure on aesthetic judgments in architectural design. They found that rooms with higher ceilings were more likely to be judged as beautiful and activated structures involved in visuospatial exploration and attention in the dorsal stream. Open rooms were judged as more beautiful compared with enclosed rooms and activated regions in the temporal lobes associated with perceived visual motion ( Vartanian et al., 2015 ).

While visual sensory information about architectural features directly impacts architectural experience and the accompanying brain dynamics, higher cognitive processes were also shown to provoke changes in brain activity in the context of architectural experience. For example, expectations about aesthetic value moderated people’s aesthetic judgment. Kirk et al. (2009b) found that if the same image was labeled as being sourced from a gallery rather than being computer generated, its aesthetic ratings were significantly higher. The neural mechanisms involved in this difference in aesthetic ratings were traced to the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC; Kirk et al., 2009b ). Memories and experience can also moderate architectural aesthetics judgments. This was shown by Kirk et al. (2009b) who found that architects, compared with non-architects, had increased activity of the bilateral medial OFC and the subcallosal cingulate gyrus, when making aesthetic judgments about buildings, rather than faces. These results show that expertise can modulate the response in reward-related brain areas ( Kirk et al., 2009b ).

While most of the above-described studies focused on the impact of architecture on aesthetic judgments and the accompanying brain dynamics, another line of research focuses on the impact of architectural designs on people’s emotional and affective state. As there are too many studies in this area to report in detail [for an overview see Higuera-Trujillo et al. (2021) ], the following exemplary studies suffice to provide the reader with a broad sense of the research questions and imaging methods used in this field. For example, using EEG in a psychophysics experiment, Naghibi Rad et al. (2019) investigated the impact that window shapes in building facades had on the perceivers’ emotional state and cortical activity. Their behavioral results showed that rectangular, square, circular and semi-circular arches were considered as pleasant window shapes, while windows with triangle and triangular arches were determined as unpleasant. Regarding ERP results, the authors found that the effect of pleasant stimuli was larger in the left hemisphere than that of unpleasant ones ( Naghibi Rad et al., 2019 ), consistent with previous notions of lateralization with regards to emotional processes ( Dimond and Farrington, 1977 ; Reuter-Lorenz and Davidson, 1981 ; Canli et al., 1998 ). By using physiological sensors, such as EEG, Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), and eye-tracking (ET), Shemesh et al. (2021) examined the connection between geometrical aspects of architectural spaces (such as scale, proportion, protrusion, and curvature) and the user’s emotional state in expert and non-expert participants (designers and non-designers, respectively). In general, they found that large symmetrical spaces positively affect users. In addition, the more extreme a change of proportion in height P(H) or width P(W) of virtual spaces was displayed, the stronger the response of distress was observed. All physiological measurements demonstrated significantly increased signals in non-designers than those of designers. This study reflected the connection between manipulations in the geometry of the virtual space and the user’s emotional reaction, especially for non-designers ( Shemesh et al., 2021 ). Analyzing the neural response to restorative environments to investigate stress restoration, Martínez-Soto et al. (2013) found that exposure to restorative environments (like buildings with vegetation-surrounding) led to activation of the middle frontal gyrus, middle and inferior temporal gyrus, insula, inferior parietal lobe, and cuneus. Their findings reflected that endogenous, top-down, directed attention is more active during viewing of low restorative potential vs. high restorative potential environments. This article provided empirical evidence that building-integrated vegetation could be considered for architects in order to improve stress-restoration for residents. As a last example, a study by Fich et al. (2014) found that participants immersed in an enclosed virtual room without windows exhibited greater reactivity to a stress test than those in a virtual room with windows. Physiological reactions of this stress state consisted of both heightened and prolonged spikes in salivary cortisol ( Fich et al., 2014 ). This finding is also consistent with the conclusion of Vartanian et al. (2015) , who found that participants were more likely to judge open rooms as beautiful as compared to enclosed rooms.

Methodological Limitations of Existing Neuro-Architecture Research

A recent literature review in the field of neuro-architecture ( Higuera-Trujillo et al., 2021 ) provided a summary of limitations of current neuro-architectural research. The first limitation, according to the authors, is that the majority of studies are confined to architectural aesthetics, not regarding other aspects of architecture like ergonomics, affordances, or functionality. Accordingly, the authors point out that it is not possible to liken architectural experience to the artistic-aesthetic experience because the latter is only one of the components of the cognitive-emotional dimension of architecture ( Higuera-Trujillo et al., 2021 ). Combining architectural ergonomics with architectural aesthetics facilitates architectural research as it leads to a more comprehensive picture of how architecture is perceived and acted upon. That is, the utility and beauty should be investigated in combination along with the underlying neural mechanism of the user interacting with the environment.

A second limitation according to Higuera-Trujillo et al. (2021) is the low ecological validity of established brain imaging methods that come with significant restrictions regarding the mobility of the participant. Data collection in stationary participants experiencing 2D images of architectural designs come with reduced ecological validity in neuro-architecture research ( Higuera-Trujillo et al., 2021 ). Experimental design and techniques that allow participants to freely explore their built environment will provide an ecological account of the psychological and behavioral phenomena underlying human-architecture interactions.

New Horizons for Architectural Neuroscience

There is a demand for new research approaches to neuro-architecture expanding the horizon for neuroscience and resulting in a wider knowledge base for architecture ( Eberhard, 2009a ). Aligned with Eberhard’s proposition, our contention is that current neuro-architecture methodology should be compatible with ecological psychology (one of many aspects of embodied cognitive sciences) and should make use of mobile brain imaging approaches in order to overcome the above-described limitations.

Architectural experiences are embodied in the sense that people physically interact with architectural spaces while moving through a building, opening doors, or taking the stairs to perceive different perspectives of the built environment through movement ( Pektaş, 2021 ). Therefore, the research object of neuro-architecture itself has inherent embodied features and the appropriate research methodology should also correspond to these embodied properties. In general, the proposed methodology for an ecologically more valid neuro-architecture should be in line with an architectural interaction process which is constituted by closely linked perception and action, and by an indispensable connection of our body, brain, and the environment. Architectural environments provide us with action possibilities ( Jelić et al., 2016 ). The possibilities to act emerge from, and are automatically processed by, our brain-body system during active exploration of our surroundings.

In what follows, we first introduce the theoretical foundation of ecological psychology to then address how ecological psychology theories can be integrated with architectural principles and how the neuro-architectural research questions can be extended from aesthetics to ergonomics within an ecological psychology framework. This offers a solution to existing limitations in current neuro-architectural research. Secondly, we will introduce Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI; Makeig et al., 2009 ; Gramann et al., 2011 , 2014 ) as one emerging brain imaging approach with the potential to improve the ecological validity of neuro-architecture research. By introducing representative MoBI studies, we will elucidate how the neuro-architectural research’s limitation with regards to brain imaging technique can be overcome.

Extending the Research Question From Aesthetics to Ergonomics Using the Framework of Ecological Psychology

Ecological psychology is an embodied, situated, and non-representationalist approach to cognition pioneered by J. J. Gibson (1904–1979) in the field of perception and by E. J. Gibson (1910–2002) in the field of developmental psychology ( Richardson et al., 2008 ; Lobo et al., 2018 ). Theorizing in psychology has traditionally relied on a number of dichotomies, including those of perception and action, of organism and environment, of subject and object, and of mind and body. The “ecological approach” as articulated by Gibson offers an alternative way of understanding psychological phenomena that challenges these concepts and categories. One illustration of this anti-dualism is evident in the name of the approach. Ecology is the branch of biological science concerned with understanding the relations that biological organisms bear to other organisms and to the environment. The Gibsonian approach is “ecological” because, in contrast with the idea that psychology studies the organism (i.e., its mind and behavior), it instead sees relations between organism and environment as the proper level of analysis: in this view, understanding the organism-environment system as a whole is the starting point for understanding mind and behavior (see e.g., Michaels and Palatinus (2014) ).

Following from this, another dichotomy rejected in the ecological approach is the one between perception and action. As it is usually conceived, perception is an “indirect” process in which meaning is attached to otherwise meaningless or ambiguous sensory information via “detailed internal representations” ( Handford et al., 1997 ; Craig and Watson, 2011 ; Rogers, 2017 ); or as the prominent cognitive scientist David Marr put it, “vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the world and where it is” ( Marr, 1982 , p. 3). Importantly, in this understanding of perception as a matter of internally reconstructing the external world, perception is also seen as distinct and independent from action: moving around can change the input for perception, but it does not significantly alter the perceptual process itself. Ecological psychology challenges this view by treating perception and action as mutual, reciprocal, continuous and symmetrically constraining processes ( Warren, 2006 ; Richardson et al., 2008 ; Heras-Escribano, 2021 ). In the Gibsonian view, perception isn’t merely associated with action, but it is an action, a process of active exploration of the environment: “perceiving is an act, not a response, an act of attention, not a triggered impression, an achievement, not a reflex” ( Gibson, 1979 , p. 149). As a result, in contrast with the description of the visual system as extracting information about the external world from images, Gibson proposed that the visual system is itself constituted by eyes “set in a head that can turn, attached to a body that can move from place to place” ( Gibson, 1979 , p. 53). And besides being inherently active, perception is also for action—a claim that is central to the Gibsonian theory of affordances.

Affordances

“Affordance” is the term that Gibson (1966; 1977; 1979 ) coined to refer to the possibilities for action that the environment offers to a given organism or agent. For example, a chair affords sitting on, a cup affords grasping with one hand and drinking from, and a table affords supporting the cup. For Gibson, we don’t simply perceive chairs, cups and tables as such (i.e., as mere material objects), but rather we perceive the opportunities for action that those objects make possible for us. It is in this sense that, in the ecological view, perception is for action: perception is of affordances. Importantly, however, affordances are not properties of the objects in and of themselves. The uses and meaning that objects have (i.e., their affordances) are relative to some organism or other. For instance, in the examples just given, the cup only affords grasping and holding for agents that have opposable thumbs (or their functional equivalent); for other organisms, the cup affords different uses, including hiding behind or inside (e.g., for an insect) and a place within which to grow (e.g., for a plant, if the cup is used as a vase). Similarly, the chair affords sitting on, and it also affords stepping on (e.g., to change a lightbulb), but only for people of a certain height: for others (e.g., babies) the chair might afford hiding under or support for standing up, but it might be too tall for other uses.

It is for reasons such as these that affordances have been traditionally understood as relational or agent-relative properties: affordances are “relations between the abilities of organisms and features of the environment” [ Chemero, 2003 , p. 189; see also Chemero (2011) ]. In a landmark study that provided early support for this relational understanding of affordances, Warren (1984) found that the boundary between climbable and unclimbable stairways corresponds to a fixed ratio between riser height and leg length. That is, instead of the stairway having the affordance of “climbability” on its own, the affordance is rather a relational property, and one that participants in Warren’s study were found to be perceptually sensitive to Warren (1984) . This research provided a methodology called intrinsic measurement to quantify affordances, since the unit of climbability is not an extrinsic unit such as centimeters, but the unit intrinsic to the body-environment relation that depends on leg lengths ( Warren, 1984 ). In a follow-up study Warren and Whang (1987) found similar results for the visual guidance of walking through apertures like doorways or other gaps on a wall: consistent with the findings from the study on stairways, an aperture’s passability was found to correspond to an objective body-scale ratio (i.e., a relational property) that is visually perceivable ( Warren and Whang, 1987 ).

Other studies have shown that our perceptual access to such action boundaries fixed at body-scale ratios is not static, but can change over time with changes in body-scale: this varies from the short-term effect that wearing a tall wooden block under one’s shoes has on the perception of opportunities for sitting and stair climbing ( Mark, 1987 ) up to comparatively longer-term effect of bodily changes during pregnancy on (the perception of) the passability of apertures ( Franchak and Adolph, 2014 ). Interestingly, some of these and other studies have found that participants were wildly inaccurate when asked to estimate absolute properties (such as heights and widths in centimeters or inches), which suggests that the perception of affordances (i.e., agent-relative properties) is more fundamental than, and independent from, the perception of non-agent-relative properties.

As these examples illustrate, the concept of affordance undermines the dichotomy of perception and action because, in this view, perception is the active exploration of opportunities for action in the environment (i.e., affordances). Moreover, the ecological theory of affordance perception also illustrates the rejection of the dichotomies between organism and environment, subject and object: as relational properties, affordances are features of an organism-environment system as a whole rather than characteristics of the environment and environmental objects on their own. And insofar as affordances constitute the action possibilities that an object or the environment offers some agent, the ecological approach also challenges traditional separations between mind and body. In this view the functional “meaning” of an object does not belong to an immaterial mental dimension separate from the material dimension of the body, as if the mind has to interpret sensory stimulation in order to infer what might be possible to do: rather, affordances are the action opportunities that objects have for some agent (and that the agent can directly perceive) precisely because of the agent’s particular physical structure and bodily activity.

Through embodied experience in architectural spaces we thus encounter possibilities for action that are linked to affective, cognitive, and physiological responses. In this sense, architecture shapes the way we perceive the environment. This should change the view on how architecture influences brain dynamics. Moreover, Warren’s (1984) research can be considered as an exemplary case to combine affordances with ergonomics in an architectural environment. The intrinsic measurement of this study demonstrates that research questions on ergonomic dimensions in architecture can be raised at the ecological scale allowing for a better understanding of the user’s interaction with the architectural environment in terms of complementarity between subjective capacities and objective properties. For instance, inspired by the above studies ( Warren, 1984 ; Mark, 1987 ; Warren and Whang, 1987 ; Franchak and Adolph, 2014 ), in neuro-architectural research the operationalization of experimental variables with regards to architectural affordances should take into account both environmental properties (such as the height of stairs, the size of the apertures, etc.) and participants’ physical capabilities (such as the height of legs, the width changes of the body during pregnancy, etc.). It is promising to investigate this complementarity between architectural properties and the users’ embodied abilities at the ecological scale and also its underlying brain dynamics. In addition, it demonstrates the potential of neuro-architectural research questions to be extended from aesthetics to ergonomics within an ecological psychology framework.

Active Exploration

As just seen, according to ecological psychology agents perceive affordances in a direct process of embodied activity: it is through the agents’ active exploration of the environment ( Michaels and Carello, 1981 ; Heft, 1989 ; Rietveld and Kiverstein, 2014 ) that affordances are perceived, rendering the embodied experience of the built environment a perception-action loop. While in the last section we described how affordances impact active exploration, we now turn to the impact of active exploration on affordances.

Architectural affordances are perceived directly when we move through the built environment. When the observer remains stationary, or when architecture is presented as an image, architectural affordances will be limited to this one specific perspective ( Heft, 2010 ). As stated by Heras-Escribano (2019) , all organisms perceive affordances directly on the condition of unrestricted exploration and sufficient ecological information in their environment. The significance of active exploration is not only reflected in the process to discover new affordances, but also in the process of modifying existing perceptual information. The popular optical illusion of the Ames room (see Figure 1 ; Ittelson, 1952 ) was discussed by Gibson to demonstrate that the illusion could be reduced through unrestricted exploration ( Gibson, 1979 ). Under a single and stationary point of observation of the Ames Room, the eye of the observer is fooled. When an observer views the Ames Room from various angles with binocular information, however, it is easy to notice the sharp sloped floor of the room. Normally, the ceiling and floor are parallel and walls are at a right angle to the ground; but when looking into the Ames Room, the observer can only assume that the room is geometric if active exploration is restricted. Once the observer discovers the abnormal conditions of the Ames room through active exploration, the observer will immediately reject their earlier assumption and also the existing illusory impression ( Gibson, 1979 ). In short, the exploratory activity is crucial for both picking up new affordances and modifying existing ones. Therefore, active exploration is the core ecological approach for investigating an agents’ perception of architectural affordances.

Figure 1. A sketch of the Ames Room. (A) Displays what the perceiver encounters from a given point. Color-codes are used throughout the diagrams. (B) Displays a conceptual plan-drawing of an Ames Room. The red dashed lines represent the field of view of the perceiver. (C) Reveals the actual conditions under which an Ames room functions. The red dashed lines represent the field of view of the perceiver, while the blue dashed lines represent the outline of a rectangle, which the Ames room illusion suggests to exist from a specific angle (A) .

The Convergence of “Exploration” and “Affordance” With Architectural Design

Ecological psychology provides us with a relational perspective to account for perception and action: perception is for action, and action is for perception. This perception-action loop is neither understood as an organism-only nor an environment-only scale, but as co-depending between organism and environment. As affordances of most environments have been designed either by ourselves (e.g., our private spaces) or by architects (e.g., public spaces), we briefly investigate how architectural affordances relate to active exploration. Providing examples of ergonomic dimensions of architectural experience, the following illustrations demonstrate the convergence of “exploration” and “affordance” with architectural design.

Affordances and active exploration are not only theoretical tenets of ecological psychology, but a practical requirement of architecture: after all, every built environment, whether natural or virtual, has affordances. Instead, we focus on features of architecture that have an inviting affordance that appeals to the physical structure of the organism and its immediate relation. Carlo Scarpa, an Italian architect, was famously known for his capacity to address the rhythm of the body by creating details that invited certain movements in a specific order. Giardino Querini Stampalia (1961–1963) uses strategic changes in the pavement from grass, to small cobblestones and concrete, to intentionally alter the velocity of the walking, moreover all stairs in the garden have each a step for either the right or the left foot [see e.g., Dodds (2000) ]. This eventually also causes different heights between steps which now also invites sitting. The rhythm and affordances of walking have then been designed by confining the actively exploring body in this case to both the velocity of the walkability and the specific order of movement for the climbability of the stairs. The very same applies to the staircase of Scarpa’s Olivetti Showroom (1958). As some of the steps are stretched so they float mid-air, they afford being used as a table or a place to sit ( Carter, 2018 ).

As a second contemporary example, consider the work of RAAAF who explicitly attempts to design the affordances of the environment to make the spaces more suitable for the designed function. Consisting of the ecological psychologist and philosopher Erik Rietveld and the architect Ronald Rietveld, the duo has produced numerous projects that demonstrate how architectural affordances can inherently be used to alter the behavior of users. For instance, the project The End of Sitting (2014) radically challenged the mainstream structure of office landscapes by altering the affordances of “working at a desk” ( Rietveld, 2016 ). Instead, RAAAF designed a physical landscape that invites various body postures suitable while working, e.g., laying, leaning, semi-crouching, and so on. Through active exploration, the users would realize that each part of the landscape provided its unique affordances. These examples all share inviting/suggestive designs that couple the agent with the environment in ways that alter neurobehavioral states.

These are only two of many cases in architecture in which a design principle with regards to active exploration and affordances were applied. We believe that since active exploration and affordances constitute our perception of the environment, including architectural design, any serious investigation of the experience of architecture must provide an active interaction with the environment under investigation. This view raises an important challenge for the field of neuro-architecture: studying the cognitive and neural basis of the effect of architectural features requires an interactive neuroimaging approach. In the next section, we demonstrate one way of overcoming this challenge.

Mobile Brain/Body Imaging as a Practical Basis for Architectural Neuroscience

Mobile Brain/Body Imaging is an emerging brain/body imaging method which allows for investigating the exploratory proposition of ecological psychology with the potential to improve the ecological validity of empirical research ( Parada and Rossi, 2021 ). Several studies in the last few years demonstrated that MoBI can be used to specifically improve the ecological validity in neuro-architectural studies by allowing for active exploration of the built environment ( Banaei et al., 2017 ; Djebbara et al., 2019 , 2021 ). In this section, we will describe how MoBI can improve the ecological validity of research within the field of neuro-architecture providing a brief introduction to the methods and a review of representative studies in the field of neuro-architecture.

Mobile Brain/Body Imaging: Definition, Main Goals and Instruments

Mobile Brain/Body Imaging is defined as a multimethod approach to imaging brain dynamics in humans actively moving through and interacting with the environment ( Jungnickel et al., 2019 ). It requires adequate hardware and software solutions to simultaneously record data streams from brain dynamics, motor behavior, and environmental events, and it requires data-driven analyses methods for multi-modal data to dissociate the brain from non-brain processes ( Makeig et al., 2009 ; Gramann et al., 2011 ). The main goal of MoBI is to model and understand natural cognition during unrestricted exploratory action in the immediate environment ( Gramann et al., 2014 ; Parada, 2018 ; Parada and Rossi, 2021 ).

Mobile Imaging means that participants should be allowed to actively explore the environment in order to reflect the neural dynamics underlying embodied cognitive processes. This necessitates small and lightweight measurement instruments. Brain/Body Imaging refers to the investigation of the neural mechanisms of cognitive processes that make use of our physical structure for cognitive goals, and the connection of mind and behavior, perception and action, and sensorimotor coupling on the ecological scale. Both brain and behavioral dynamics have to be recorded in synchrony to explore the bidirectional influence between behavior and brain dynamics. Capturing brain/body dynamics will require multiple sensors to record the different data streams and software to integrate them synchronously (see Figure 2 ).

Figure 2. The illustration depicts a MoBI setup using mobile EEG hardware combined with virtual reality and motion capture through the VR tracking system [from Djebbara et al. (2021) ; used with permission].

Studies in the real world, while providing high ecological validity, do miss control of unwanted factors and cannot simply repeat stimuli material to gain a better signal-to-noise ratio in the signal of interest. Thus, for controlled and repeated stimulus presentation, head-mounted virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) displays can be integrated in the MoBI hardware system providing an alternative for presenting participants with different environments that can be actively explored while allowing for experimental control and systematically manipulating experimental variables of interest. Furthermore, other stimulus modalities, such as auditory and tactile stimuli, could also be compatible with head-mounted VR displays ( Jungnickel et al., 2019 ).

Previous Mobile Brain/Body Imaging Studies in Neuro-Architecture

Using MoBI, Banaei et al. (2017) investigated human brain dynamics related to the affective impact of interior forms when the perceiver actively explores an architectural space. The experimental task required participants to naturally walk through different architectural spaces with interior forms extracted from a large corpus of architectural pictures. The rooms represented different combinations of interior forms derived from formal cluster analysis of pictures of the real built environment. Importantly, in order to investigate human brain dynamics related to the affective experience of interior forms during architectural exploration, multimodal data were recorded including EEG and motion capture ( Banaei et al., 2017 ).

The authors found that curvature geometries of interior forms influenced brain activity originating from the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) while the posterior cingulate cortex and the occipital lobe were involved in the processing of different room perspectives ( Banaei et al., 2017 ). This MoBI architectural neuroscience study demonstrates that both the architectural interior form (such as type, location, scale, and angle) and the exploration of the surroundings will shape the experience of the built environment, providing a neuroscientific basis for architectural design ( Banaei et al., 2017 ). Additionally, this research illustrates the potential of MoBI to investigate human brain dynamics and natural experience of participants actively exploring architectural environments.

Another MoBI study by Djebbara et al. (2019 , 2021) investigated the human brain dynamics during transitions through doors of different widths. The authors aimed to investigate how architectural affordances affect brain dynamics by creating three kinds of transitions differing in their passability. Of the three doors, only one did not afford to be transitioned. In the experimental task, implemented in VR, the participants moved from one room to a second room, passing one of the three doors connecting the rooms. The door width which could either be impassable (narrow), passable (medium), or easily passable (wide) formed the operational definition of architectural affordance in their experiment. For priming different interactions with this environment, the authors used a Go/NoGo paradigm either prompting the person to pass through the door (the Go condition), or indicating that the person should not pass through the door (NoGo condition). EEG was used to record their brain activity during the task and a Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) questionnaire was used to measure participants’ emotional experience after every trial ( Djebbara et al., 2019 , 2021 ).

The subjective reports from the SAM showed that different transition affordances influenced the architectural experience of participants. Different door widths influenced participants’ emotional experience, especially when instructed to pass through the door (i.e., forced interaction with the environment) as compared to instructions that did not require interactions with the environment. The physiological results, on the other hand, revealed that brain activity in visual sensory regions and motor areas reflected the affordance of the transition already around 200 ms, irrespective of whether participants knew that they should or should not pass into the second room. This reflects an automated processing of the affordance present in the built environment even if no further interaction with the environment is planned. In addition, differences in the post-imperative negative variation (PINV), a component of the event-related potential (ERP) of the EEG, were visible only in trials that required an interaction with the environment (Go-trials) while in the NoGo condition, this architectural affordance effect was not observed. In other words, the possible interactions with the transition automatically activated cortical areas underlying perceptual and motor responses even in the absence of planned interactions while additional affordance-specific modulations of brain activity were observed during interactions with the built environment ( Djebbara et al., 2019 , 2021 ).

The results from Djebbara et al. (2019) support the view that possibilities of imminent actions shape our perception ( Djebbara and Gramann, 2022 ). This view is consistent with the propositions of direct perception and perception-action coupling within ecological psychology ( Djebbara et al., 2019 ; Gepshtein and Snider, 2019 ). The reasons why imminent action possibilities will influence our architectural perception are that the information is exactly embedded inside imminent action and will further emerge and be perceived during the exploration process rather than a signal transformation, representation, and computation process. Much like Warren’s (1984) research helped elucidate the behavioral dimension of architectural experience, the study of Djebbara et al. (2019) is an exemplary case of integrating the theoretical framework of ecological psychology with neuro-architecture.

In short, MoBI makes it possible to discover, quantify and visualize the embodiment of human agents in an architectural environment with all relevant dimensions of architecture such as aesthetics, ergonomics and more, which can’t be realized by a stationary experimental paradigm. MoBI is an efficient technique to study natural cognition in architectural exploration. However, as the interaction with the environment can become relatively complex in terms of sensory information and motor behavior, a cautious and systematic approach is advisable. As suggested by Parada (2018) and King and Parada (2021) , the careful and incremental approach to introducing more complex environments and motor behavior, going from highly controlled setups to more ecologically valid ones, ensures the replicability and control over variables. In other words, by first identifying what to look for, e.g., cortical or behavioral features, in a highly controlled experiment, it is then possible to introduce incremental complexity and assess the quality of the more ecologically valid experiments.

Although neuro-architecture is a thriving field, there are two methodological limitations within neuro-architectural research ( Higuera-Trujillo et al., 2021 ). The existing research in the field of architectural neuroscience mainly addresses aesthetics out of many different relevant architectural aspects. The brain imaging methods that are typically used require participants to remain stationary, which prevents natural interactions with their architectural surroundings.

In the present article, we argued that concepts of ecological psychology like affordance and active exploration could extend the horizon of the research questions within neuro-architecture to include ergonomics in architecture, which widens the theoretical and empirical framework under which neuro-architectural research is conducted leading to a more comprehensive picture. That is, both the utility and beauty in architecture should be investigated including the analyses of the underlying neural mechanism. Accordingly, inspired by several empirical studies, the operational definition of variables with regards to architectural ergonomics could be established from the perspectives of the complementarity between environmental properties and the agent’s physical capacities, as well as the perception-action loop during architectural exploration. This, however, requires new technological solutions to imaging human brain dynamics during active exploration and interaction with the built environment.

Emerging brain imaging techniques like MoBI, implementing the exploration proposition of ecological psychology in experimental protocols, overcome the limitations of prevalent stationary brain imaging methods and improve the ecological validity of empirical neuroscientific research. Based on the potential of MoBI, more ecologically valid experimental research within the field of neuro-architecture can be conducted. Existing MoBI studies already show evidence of how the brain perceives its surroundings. These new insights can be used to improve architectural design strategies and regulations to eventually improve human health and well-being.

In summary, we described an integrative methodological framework to combine ecological psychology with state-of-the-art neuroscience methods for neuro-architectural empirical research, aiming at extending the horizon of the research questions in the field of neuro-architecture and improving the ecological validity of its experimental framework. This is a promising way to push the field of neuro-architecture forward.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

We acknowledge support by the German Research Foundation and Open Access Publication Fund of TU Berlin. SW was funded by a grant from China Scholarship Council (File No. 201906750020).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Bilal Arafaat for fruitful discussions and proofreading of the manuscript.

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Keywords : neuro-architecture, ecological psychology, mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI), methodology, aesthetics and ergonomics, ecological validity

Citation: Wang S, Sanches de Oliveira G, Djebbara Z and Gramann K (2022) The Embodiment of Architectural Experience: A Methodological Perspective on Neuro-Architecture. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 16:833528. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.833528

Received: 11 December 2021; Accepted: 30 March 2022; Published: 09 May 2022.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2022 Wang, Sanches de Oliveira, Djebbara and Gramann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Sheng Wang, [email protected]

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Research in Architecture and Urbanism https://www. archurbanresearch.net (RAU) is an online platform that captures major research activities of Professor Ashraf M. Salama and colleagues, outlines efforts undertaken as part of key research projects that amount to a total of $ US 3.0 million dollars of research funds over a period of more than 30 years . The site includes links to research publications, different types of information of interest to architects, urban designers, and planners who are seeking to expand their knowledge on research in architecture and urban environments globally but with a focus on Gulf Cities and Egypt as important contexts within the global south.

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Professor Ashraf M. Salama

I s academic, scholar, and Chair in Architecture at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, Director of the Cluster for Research in Architecture and Urbanism in the Global South since 2014, and Former Head of the School of Architecture (2014-2020). He holds B.Sc. MSc. and PhD in architecture and has received his education at Al Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt and North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA. He has published over 170 outputs in the international refereed press; authored and co-edited more than 15 books. He is the chief editor of the Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research and Open House international . Professor Salama is the UIA 2017 Recipient of Jean Tschumi Prize for Excellence in Architectural Education and Criticis m ( v isit here >> ) or visit his professional website here >> https://www.ashrafsalamanet.net/ or the news blog here >> https://ashrafsalama.blogspot.com/

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Research in Architecture: Way of Examining Details

• November 18, 2022
• By: Priyanshi Shah

Writing acts as transmission in an articulated way composed of various expressions to relate to the reader. Architecture is a profession of crafting new ideas and experimenting with them considering the future possibilities and well-being of the people. Architects have different methods of experimenting with some sketches, drafting, and assembling models to enhance the space while some digitalizing it, constructing 3D models, and animated videos/VR to feel the space in an intimate way. Research in the architecture profession is very rare and very few people experiment with it. It is essential today to understand the various aspects of art, culture, belief, economy, etc to design in a profound style. The philosophy behind the spaces has always been an intriguing thing to explore. The thoughts behind the idea, understanding and analyzing them create a narrative to be explained and experimented on. The importance of research in architecture implies a deep understanding of various subjects of philosophy, psychology, literature, art, and culture.

Importance of Research

An architect is not just an architect; he or she is someone who designs around human comfort and needs. In essence, it is about creating something unique based on a philosophy and approach. Our desire to create is largely dictated by the past, present, or future built form. Solid research backs up in strengthens design contextually. While architects in practice claim that research does not influence their work, there is no significant evidence to support that claim. Researchers tend to perceive research as a "theoretical" aspect when in fact it encompasses a variety of factors. A research project is not always a project that an authority can approach; it is about understanding the past and relating it to the present in order to create a new future. Architectural evolution demands an analysis of the past, to create a better hierarchy of spaces for mankind. It gives context to the process and gives direction to the process with a product of research. Architects do not just build buildings, they comprehend and absorb the space narratives that make up the building. Research in architecture requires a well-structured approach and methodology for developing knowledge in a certain direction. It also gives practitioners a competitive advantage in the field by enhancing their abilities as professionals.

It is imperative to minimize costs, maximize efficiency, and optimize resources in this period of dynamic times in order for the design to function socially, culturally, and economically. 

In the AIA's view, architectural research has the potential to affect and be relevant at three scales:

1. We need to conduct thorough research to understand who we are designing for at an individual/human scale. By analyzing how architecture impacts lives and how user response to design affects human performance, we can gain a better understanding of human behavior. 

2. Researching how buildings impact the environment and how they consume a lot of resources and energy. Investigating the technology trends used in the design, as well as the impact materials, have on the occupants.

3. Architecture shapes our society at the community level. Achieving societal goals can be achieved through the intervention of architects. It is possible to build a better environment by researching the cultures and backgrounds of places. Both the built structure and the user benefit from studying at these levels.

Collaboration and Learning

Designers gain a deeper understanding of clients through architectural research. The focus isn't just on revealing and documenting materials and technologies and making them relevant to society. Each level of research helps understand the requirements of the project's individuality.

When a study covers all aspects of a project, on a macro and micro scale, architecture speaks. Despite the fact that research is conducted at multiple levels within the Indian architectural practice, it is not recognized as a separate entity. Case studies are conducted by designers to gain a thorough understanding of a project and the needs of the client. As part of the design process, a proper market-material survey is also conducted, in order to determine the best materials while also considering the preferences and needs of the user, which will be used for analysis after the building is finished. A systematic approach to carrying out all these functions is the only factor being overlooked. Researchers would recognize that research is integral to the design process only if an appropriate process is outlined.

It takes significant research to create a unique architecture that speaks of the cultural context and the age in which it was produced. In architectural research and architectural design, problem components are examined, and their interrelatedness is analyzed, which leads to a functional resolution. It provides insights for solving future problems along with ways to make the design relevant and functional. In practice-oriented research, the client's needs and preferences determine the scope of the research. It is important to consider trial and error in the process. The design relies heavily on architectural research, which is why it should be encouraged and infused into every stage of the design process at every level.

Cognitive research has always been a part of architectural education. A person must acquire knowledge in order to impart it. A continuous, provocative process is involved in the process of acquiring. The profession of architecture gains value as a result of critical analysis. In the realm of architecture, there are no wrong answers, and it is all a matter of perception. An inquiring and investigating mind is essential to rationalizing an opinion. At the moment, architecture and design require extensive collaboration and an investigative mindset. According to Vitruvius in his first book on architecture, successful execution, and comprehension of architecture requires a multidisciplinary understanding of other allied fields. It is impossible to separate art and science in architecture. Finding precedents and references in both becomes essential. The unproductive separation between science and art in research can be bridged if architectural research is viewed as knowledge creation rather than science or art.

An observant Architect and wandering soul who captures the tales of poetic experiences through writing. She is a traveler by heart who explores the essence through understanding the relationship between people and places with sensitivity, as she believes “Architecture is an extension of one’s life “

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115 awesome architecture research topics: useful list of ideas.

If you are reading this, it means you need to write an excellent architectural research paper and need some help choosing the topic. The good news is that our expert writers have just updated our list of 115 unique architecture research topics.

This means you can find some original ideas right here on this page. Of course, you can use any of our ideas for free – as long as you get an A+ on your next research paper.

Writing an Architecture Essay Quickly

If you are like most students, you probably don’t know how to write complex architecture research papers quickly. This can be a real problem, especially if you need to finish your essay quickly. After all, you probably have several other school projects to focus on – not to mention tests and exams. This is why we will give you more than just awesome architecture research paper topics. We will help you with a guide on how to write a great paper quickly:

• First, go through our architectural research topics and pick the one you like the most.
• Write a thesis statement. In a sentence, tell your readers what your paper aims to demonstrate.
• Write an introduction for your essay. This is where you present your thesis statement and tell your audience a bit more about the subject.
• Write three or more body paragraphs, each dealing with a single idea. Generally, you will start the paragraph with a clear statement and then use the rest of the paragraph to bring evidence in support of your statement.
• Write a conclusion for your research paper. Most often, it’s enough to restate the thesis and summarize all your findings. Tell your audience how your findings support your thesis and wrap everything up with a call to action (this is optional).
• Edit your work and delete parts that are redundant, don’t make sense or are simply unnecessary. Add more content to parts that need it.
• Proofread your work at least twice. Who wants to lose some points over silly mistakes like typos or spelling errors?

Best Architectural Topics for Research

Now that you know what you need to do to write a paper quickly, you probably want to minimize the time you spend searching for architectural topics for research. This is where we can definitely help you. Take a look at our list of 115 awesome architecture paper topics and use as many of them as you like. All of them are 100% free!

Interesting Questions About Architecture

Here are some interesting questions about architecture that should fire up your creative engine:

• What are the costs of an architect?
• Is concrete obsolete in 2023?
• How long does it take to design a unique skyscraper?
• What are the worst architectural mistakes of the 1900s?
• What does an architect really do?
• How do you pick the right architect for a major project?
• What is the worst thing about architecture in the UK?
• Is architecture an artistic profession?
• What are the expected advancements in architecture in 2023?
• How long will we continue to use steel?
• What are the best ways to design a skyscraper?
• Is architecture a creative profession?
• Why is planning a bridge so difficult?

Easy Research Topics in Architecture

If you don’t want to spend more than a few hours working on your architecture paper, we have a list of easy research topics in architecture right here:

• A short history of architecture in the United States
• Discuss urban planning in Eastern Europe
• Talk about maritime technology
• Ancient Greek architecture
• Talk about metal fatigue in skyscrapers
• Is it difficult being an architect?
• Ancient Roman architecture
• The importance of restoring heritage buildings
• Talk about innovations in bridge design
• Architecture in Asian countries
• Planning a new urban park in your neighborhood
• Discuss climate control in modern buildings
• Architecture in African countries

Topics Related to Public Structures

Designing public structures is not an easy thing to do, but writing a paper about them shouldn’t be too difficult. Here are some nice topics related to public structures:

• An in-depth look at the design of the Lincoln Memorial
• Design the plan of a new bank in your neighborhood
• Designing a new skyscraper in your city
• An in-depth look at the design of the Empire State Building
• Building the latest public service building in the city
• A space research center in Colorado Springs
• An in-depth look at the design of the White House
• Research the design of the United States Capitol building
• The Golden Gate Bridge: an innovative design

Top Ideas Related to Urban Planning

Interested in talking about urban planning? No problem, we can help. Take a look at our list of top ideas related to urban planning:

• An in-depth look at bicycle transportation in New York City
• Research the rational-comprehensive approach to urban planning
• Housing peculiarities in Scotland
• Discuss the importance of urban design in 2023
• Discuss the Concentric Model Zone by Ernest Burgess
• How can you become a successful urban planner?
• The importance of landscape in modern urbanism
• An in-depth look at housing affordability in the UK
• Planning land use in large cities in North America
• What is the role of an urban planner?
• Transport problems in London
• Discuss the Three Magnets theory by Ebenezer Howard

Architecture Thesis Topics

In case you’ve ran out of ideas for a topic, we have some of the best architecture thesis topics on the Internet. Check out these original ideas:

• Talk about the latest trends in environmental tech
• Discuss urban intensification challenges
• Design a brand new shopping mall in your area
• An efficient plan of the London transportation system
• Latest trends in theatre architecture
• Talk about lighting technology in Egyptian pyramids
• Common problems when designing a skyscraper
• Latest advancements in virtual planning

Complex Architectural Topics for Research

We know some students want to try something a bit more difficult to impress their professor. Here are some pretty complex architectural topics for research:

• Compare urban housing with rural housing in the UK
• The use of concrete in 2023
• Modern building technologies
• The latest building materials
• Talk about resource use maximization
• Discuss the impact of environmental technology on architecture
• Talk about the peculiarities of Islamic architecture
• Discuss planning a new school in a rural area

Great Architecture Thesis Ideas

If you are preparing to start working on your thesis, you will be thrilled to learn that we have a list of great architecture thesis ideas for you:

• Talk about the theories behind resilient designs
• Solving traffic congestions in New York City
• Building materials of the future
• Talk about sustainable rural development
• What are the principles of lightweight architecture?
• Materials used in ancient architecture
• The importance of using domes in your designs
• How can you make architecture an art?

Interesting Topics Related to Architecture

This is where our writers and editors selected the most interesting ideas. Check out our most interesting topics related to architecture:

• Talk about the rehabilitation of an ancient structure
• The design of Egyptian temples
• What do you think architecture will look like in 100 years?
• Indoor air quality and architecture
• Historic French architecture peculiarities
• How can you maximize usable space in your designs?
• Talk about constructing in extreme weather conditions
• How important are arches in 2023?

Interior Design Topics

If you want your research paper to be about something in interior design, our experts have compiled a list of unique interior design topics for you:

• Is interior design a dying industry?
• Talk about how people perceive colors
• The latest decorating styles in the UK
• The best color combinations in 2023
• Latest trends in interior design
• Differences in interior design in 3 different countries
• Talk about the rise of statement ceilings
• Curves instead of straight lines in 2023

Good Topics for High School Students

Our list wouldn’t be complete without a section of good topics for high school students. Check out these ideas and take your pick:

• Discuss why arches are important
• Is interior design a part of architecture?
• How do domes influence modern designs?
• Design a simple living space
• Design a new stadium in your area
• What is lightweight architecture?
• Talk about Roman concrete

Awesome Ideas for College

Are you a college student looking for top notch topics for his next architecture research paper? Check out these great awesome ideas for college:

• What is the most important building material today?
• Discuss the creation of 3D architectural designs
• Discuss about weather effects on buildings
• Common problems designing a hospital
• How did Covid-19 influence architecture?
• Talk about the use of technology in architecture
• The importance of virtual planning

Thesis Topics Related to Cultural Facilities

If you want to write your next paper on something related to culture, we have some of the best thesis topics related to cultural facilities:

• Design a new library in your city
• How important is the design of a cultural facility?
• Designing multidisciplinary spaces in 2023
• The concept of resonating with people
• The importance of integrating nature into your designs
• Making effective use of land in your designs
• Designing a worship center worthy of an award

Controversial Architecture Topics

Of course, we encourage every student to write about controversial topics. In fact, we have some very interesting controversial architecture topics right here:

• The design and building of the Sagrada Familia
• The lack of a national building code in Nigeria
• Discuss the problems involved with collaborative processes
• Trust issues in the modern world of architecture
• An in-depth look at the Scottish Parliament Building
• Is a good architect a good designer?
• Are building codes in the US flawed?

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Does this mean you can write my paper fast and cheap? Yes, we can! Writing a thesis architecture professors appreciate can be really difficult, we know. However, we want to assure you that we will help every student do a great job and get a top grade on his next essay or research paper. Get in touch with us today and get a nice discount on your first order!

A Pulse Check on Landscape Performance in Professional Practice

After celebrating 10 years of the Landscape Performance Series in 2020, LAF continues to promote and invest in landscape performance in order to foster long-term change within the discipline of landscape architecture and beyond.  Landscape performance focuses on the measurable environmental, social, and economic impacts of landscape solutions and the use of performance data for improved designs, ongoing management and maintenance, and to make the case for sustainable designs and policies. Although forms of landscape performance research and evaluation have existed for decades, LAF has worked to cement the status of landscape performance as a key aspect of landscape architectural research, education, and practice.

While much progress has been made, perhaps the most challenging aspect has been integrating landscape performance within the everyday, project-by-project practice of professional landscape architecture. Although emerging forms of practice are attempting to change this, professional practice is still largely client- and market-driven with narrow margins. This presents challenges for a performance-focused design process as well as post-occupancy evaluation, which require a scope and timing of services that don’t align with the conventional design process. 

To better understand the current state of landscape performance in leading firms, LAF convened eight landscape architecture practitioners who are leaders in landscape performance. Their conversations provided a wealth of perspective and insight into the ways in which landscape performance has become integral to professional practice and where challenges still exist. 

Why is landscape performance important to practice?

The practitioners expressed that landscape performance had many different facets. They reported being most invested in landscape performance as a way to improve their own practice and contribute to a larger body of knowledge for the discipline. They considered it helpful, but less essential, for client education or advocacy purposes – expressing that for the most part, they are hired by clients who already believe in their ability to deliver on project goals; or that clients were not interested specifically in performance metrics or evaluation. They also use landscape performance to convey the value of landscape solutions as a way to educate those outside the discipline and market their work.

The practitioners expressed that while comprehensive, the term “landscape performance” can sometimes be too vague – especially when speaking to clients. They suggested that practitioners use alternative terms where appropriate such as “landscape statistics” (when focusing on measurement) or “landscape impact” (when focusing on the delivery of results). 

How is landscape performance integrated?

The conversations revealed that this group of practitioners had integrated landscape performance in their work primarily on a project-specific, partnership-based, or opportunistic basis. The most common way was through participating in LAF’s Case Study Investigation (CSI) program to conduct a post-occupancy evaluation of a project. In general, partnering with university faculty or other experts like project consultants was a primary way that those within the group engaged with landscape performance. Some integrated a performance-focused approach in their design process as part of pursuing SITES certification , as driven by individual intellectual curiosity, or as part of site commissioning — a somewhat rare but emerging adaption of the building commissioning process, which is fairly standard for building systems. 

What are the barriers?

The most ubiquitous barriers described by the group were: lack of time and funding within project budgets, limited client interest, lack of integration with the tools typically used within design offices, designer discomfort with metrics, and difficulty creating systems to apply lessons learned from previous projects to future projects, even when post-occupancy evaluation is done. Participants felt that a landscape performance approach for all their projects is not feasible or even desirable, and they observed that clients who are long-term land stewards were better suited to a landscape performance-focused approach as compared to the developers who sell or turn over a property to return profit on their investment in the short-term. Some practitioners felt that some projects are more about design and art than a bottom-line, benefits-driven approach. Generally, the group felt that it may be most appropriate to focus on project- or topic-specific landscape performance studies that yield transferrable knowledge to be applied to practice, rather than trying to study all projects. 

How can it be scaled?

The practitioners strongly felt that to be effective, landscape performance must be used not only by larger or medium-size firms that work in the public realm but also by smaller firms and residential designers, who collectively influence large areas of land. To reach their full potential, high-performance landscape interventions must be implemented on a broad scale.

Ultimately, integrating landscape performance into design work – whether it’s designing for high-performance landscapes, using performance estimates to pursue certification, conducting post-occupancy evaluation of projects to learn for future designs, or using metrics to convey value – was clearly shown not to be a one-size-fits-all approach.

The reflections of this small group of practitioners demonstrate how far the integration of landscape performance has come. Thank you to our participants:

• Anya Domlesky, Director of Research, SWA
• Allison Harvey, Principal, OJB
• Eric Kramer, Principal, Reed Hilderbrand 
• Allyson Mendenhall, Director of Strategic Initiatives, Sasaki
• Meg Plumb, DW Legacy Design Director, Design Workshop
• Rebecca Popowsky, Associate, OLIN Labs
• Stephanie Roa, Senior Designer, LandDesign
• Meghan Talarowski, Executive Director, Studio Ludo 

We know that many other practitioners and firms are working to consider landscape performance more comprehensively during the design process and better understand and provide environmental, social, and economic outcomes for their clients and communities. LAF looks forward to continuing to support these efforts through the Landscape Performance Series and Case Study Investigation program. 

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Celebrating the Natural World: Myles Peña, Lecturer in Architecture

Eight Questions with Myles Peña, Lecturer in Architecture

  “If you can find the unique beauty in a place or site and bring it to everyone's attention, you'll have a successful project.”

Between the lively city of Tucson and the core principles of the college, CAPLA was Myles Peña’s perfect fit. Since joining the college last fall, he has shared his expertise with aspiring architects to better prepare them for their dream careers.   

What got you into architecture?

I don’t even really remember how I got into architecture, it was just always something I wanted to do. Before I even knew what an architect was, I was drawing houses and I still have sets of plans I drew when I was 7 or 8. Growing up I worked with my family on roofing and remodeling work during the summers. I continued to do small construction projects in high school and was fortunate to have drafting classes at my high school, so I got great exposure to the field and knew it was exactly what I wanted to do.

What brought you to CAPLA? Where were you located and what were you doing before you joined the college?

The beauty of the landscapes outside of Tucson and the cultural vibrancy inside of Tucson really drew me to the area. Having a school that aligns with my values and experience of teaching design along with the technical components to make it possible was the icing on the cake.

University of Providence University Center by Myles Peña . 

Are you currently practicing in the field of architecture?

I am! My background is mostly in educational institutions and high-rise workplace design, but I've also worked on everything from healthcare, master planning and custom millwork and furniture to supportive housing and multi-family residential. I'm currently a solo practitioner focusing on small-scale residential and commercial work.

What inspires your work?

Finding simple moments to celebrate by bringing in the rhythms of the natural world outside into the space inspires my work. My work is driven by highlighting the way the light comes into a space filtered through a tree canopy, bringing attention to moments of sky or intentionally sequencing spaces in relation to a specific view. I’m fortunate to get to spend a lot of time active outdoors and I want to bring that beauty into everyday life.

White Bird House by Myles Peña . 

What are you teaching this semester, and what do you most enjoy about teaching?

I'm currently teaching a first year foundations course and a third year design studio in the School of Architecture . I really enjoy watching a new concept click for the students and seeing how quickly they grow as a result. The environment of creativity and curiosity is invigorating and I appreciate the reflection it provides.

How do you bring your research and practice into your teaching?

I bring over a lot of the ways I practice into the studio by sharing the specific traits that have helped make my projects a success, sharing the processes I use and encouraging constraints that better help prepare students for practice. 

What advice do you have for students?

Focus on process over product. Open your eyes and ears to the world. Always know why. And if you can find the unique beauty in a place or site and bring it to everyone's attention, you'll have a successful project.

Workplace Gathering Area by Myles Peña . 

Where do you see the future of architecture going?

It’s always difficult to say, but I’m optimistic that architects will begin to prioritize existing structures first and work to advocate for buildings that have a longer lifespan and are built with materials that can be recovered and reused at the end of a building’s lifespan. The rise of mass timber is exciting and more architects are beginning to see the value in designing not just for the people using the spaces, but also with intentionality around the local habitat and species which call the site home. This shift of community to include wildlife makes for higher quality spaces while combating the impacts of development.

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Interdisciplinary Authors Discuss Intersection of Health and the Built Environment in Their New Book

A new interdisciplinary book, "Measuring the Impact of the Built Environment on Health, Wellbeing, and Performance," explores how technology can gauge and enhance health in homes and offices. It offers insights, methodologies and pandemic-related considerations for optimizing building designs

New Beginnings: Julie Reed, Undergraduate Advising Coordinator

Julie Reed, CAPLA's new undergraduate advising coordinator, emphasizes utilizing available resources and seeking guidance when needed for student success. With a background in academic advising, she brings strong support and a passion for creativity and sustainability to the college community.

Drachman Institute, Southwest Partners Charts Path to Net Zero Uban Water Future

The "Achieving a Net Zero Urban Water Future Across the Southwest" workshop, funded by a National Science Foundation Research Coordination Network (RCN) grant, gathered academics, water managers, and government officials from Albuquerque, Denver, Los Angeles, and Tucson—areas reliant on the Colorado River.

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Kelsey Habla (BSArch ’16 MArch ’18)

Senior consultant, acoustics, audiovisual, theatre and experience design.

Kelsey Habla is a Senior Consultant on the Acoustics, AV, Theatre, and Experience Design team at Arup, based in New York City. With a background in Architecture, Theatre and Universal Design, she applies her range of technical skills and user centered design approach to all her work.

In her six years at Arup, Kelsey has supported several key multi-disciplinary projects including Dartmouth College Hopkins Center for the Arts, Google's NY HQ at St. John's Terminal, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, and Unified Vision for Downtown Providence.

Kelsey is engaged in many Equality, Diversity and Inclusion initiatives, serving as the co-chair of the Connect Women Employee Resource Group and a member of the Scholarship Committee where she has developed multiple scholarships and opportunities for students to learn about the AEC industry. She has also supported several Community Engagement projects including the Lower East Side Girls Club and The Black Library.

Published April 5, 2024

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