Are neuroscientists the next great architects?

ARCHITECTS HAVE BEENtalking for years about biophilic design, evidence based design, design informed by the work of psychologists. But last May, at the professions annual convention, John Zeisel and fellow panelists were trying to explain neuroscience to a packed ballroom.

The late-afternoon session pushed well past the end of the day; questions just kept coming. It was a scene, Zeisel marveledall this interest in neurosciencethat would not have taken place just a few years earlier.

Zeisel is a sociologist and architect who has researched the design of facilities for Alzheimers patients. Architects, he explains, understand about aesthetics; they know about psychology. The next depth to which they can go is understanding the brain and how it worksandwhydo people feel more comfortable in one space than another?

This is an admittedly abstract concept. To help explain, architects often tell this story: Early in his career, when he was still struggling to find a cure for polio,Jonas Salkretreated to Umbria, Italy, to the monastery at the Basilica of Assisi. The 13th-century Franciscan monastery rises out of the hillside in geometric white stone, with Romanesque arches framing its quiet courtyards. Salk would insist, for the rest of his life, that something about this placethe design and the environment in which he found himselfhelped to clear his obstructed mind, inspiring the solution that led to his famous polio vaccine.

He really thought there was something to this, says thearchitect Alison Whitelaw, that the quality of the built environment could affect the performance of the brain.

Today, the near 10-year-oldAcademy of Neuroscience for Architecturebelieves that neuroscience could make sciences greatest contribution to the field of architecture since physics informed fundamental structural methods, acoustic designs, and lighting calculations in the late 19th century. In September, the academy held its first national conference at, fittingly, the Salk Institute, in La Jolla, California. When the academy solicited proposals from anyone who might have insight or research to contribute, Whitelaw expected a handful of takers. The conference instead received dozens of proposals from all over the worldfrom people, Whitelaw says, we didnt even know were working in this field.

Now, thanks to a $500,000 gift from the estate of solar-energy pioneer Harold Hay, the academy has dedicated resources to fund research at the intersection of these seemingly disparate fields. And its dream to create joint-degree programs in architecture and neuroscience seems not so far off.

If architects understood both fields, they might be able, in designing hospitals, schools, and homes for people with all manner of disabilities, to create places that would support the development of premature babies, the treatment of children with autism, the fostering of learning abilities of students. Imagine hospitals with such intuitive way-finding that no one gets lost (or stressed as a result); imagine an Alzheimers facility that could help its residents remember who they are.

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UNTIL ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO, scientists believed that our adult brains lost neurons during normal aging at a low but steady rate, and that we werent able to replace them, as we do skin cells. This suggested that the brain you had in your early 20s was perhaps the best brain you were going to get. But research in the late 1990s byneurobiologist Fred Gageand other scientists confirmed the process of adult neurogenesis. New neurons continue to be born throughout life, particularly in the hippocampus, the part of your brain that processes new information on its way to being stored as long-term memories. This means that your capacity to add new memories and learn new skills can continue to expand. And how fast these cells are added seems directly influenced by the richness of our interactions with our environment. When Gage introduced these findings to architects at theAmerican Institute of Architects 2003 convention, he pronounced an idea that is still sinking in: Changes in the environment change the brain, and therefore they change our behavior.

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Are neuroscientists the next great architects?