The science of how buildings shape the brain that inhabits them

The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture took shape in 2002 as a Legacy Project to the national American Institute of Architects Convention, and was founded in 2003 by the AIA’s San Diego chapter, incorporating as a California 501(c)(3) that February. The June 2003 Convention featured a keynote on architecture and neuroscience by Dr Fred Gage, a principal investigator at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, and the AIA College of Fellows announced that ANFA and its founding president, John Paul Eberhard, had won the Latrobe Prize. The Salk Institute was the catalyst and has been the long-running host of ANFA’s conferences rather than the founding body.

ANFA’s mission is to promote and advance knowledge linking neuroscience research to an understanding of human responses to the built environment. The REN Method’s own view, which is ours and not ANFA’s, is that this formalises something Classical Feng Shui, Vastu Shastra and other spatial traditions arrived at through centuries of observation: the built environment is not a neutral container for human experience.

Wang and colleagues take stock of neuro-architecture, the study of the neural basis of how people perceive and interact with the architecture around them, and argue it is not yet delivering on its promise. They identify two limitations in the current brain-imaging work: the research is often restricted to the aesthetic dimension of architectural experience, and the typical tools require participants to stay stationary, which prevents naturalistic interaction with the space being studied.

Their proposal is to ground the field in ecological psychology, emphasising embodied exploration and affordances rather than aesthetic contemplation alone, and to adopt Mobile Brain/Body Imaging (MoBI) so that neural activity can be recorded while people actually move through a building. This is a paper about how to do the science properly. It is a useful corrective to anyone, including us, who would like neuroarchitecture to have more settled answers than it currently does.