The heuristics of architectural evaluation
I was talking to a fellow architect about a recently completed building by a well-known architect in The Hague and her first reaction was: "Oh, I like him!" That was also the end of the discussion. Her statement implied a lot: she liked him, so he was a good architect and his buildings were by definition good. What could I tell her?
What I should have told her is that what she said was a typical example of the biased, ineffective heuristics that reveal the limitations of our cognition: when faced with a difficult question, we often substitute it with another that's easier to answer without even realizing it. An example of such failures in Kahneman's Thinking, fast and slow concerns an investment decision one made to buy stock of a motorcar manufacturer because he admired their cars, without pausing to examine if the stock was underpriced at the time.
This may be irresponsible behaviour in finance but in architecture it's normal: evaluating a building or design is hard, so we go by the reputation of the architects, by how much we like them and the tendencies they represent, and take the claims they make about their designs and the principles of the tendencies at face value. It follows that a building by a well-known architect is by default good enough and certainly interesting.
One could argue that we know what we like intuitively: it's enough to see something to know it, in the same way that we can know that a person is angry from the first word they utter on the telephone or from the first glimpse we catch of their face, even from a photograph. This is called type 1 or system 1 thinking. It's what we do daily in an automatic, apparently effortlessly and generally reliably. It also applies to design products: if we're shopping for chairs, it's enough to see a photograph on a web page or in a catalogue to know that it's good.
However, no-one should buy a chair without first sitting on it or a car without a test drive. Similarly, even an expert cannot say that a design is good at the first glance of a floor plan. One needs to study the documents, make measurements and comparisons - in other words, engage in type 2 or system 2 thinking: effortful and analytical and so generally transparent and reliable. The problem is that this kind of thinking is expensive, so we try to avoid it, unless type 1 thinking fails to deliver. Even then, we usually do it within the constraints determined by type 1 thinking: we don't normally test-drive cars that don't appeal to us.
It follows that experiencing architecture in the same way that one experiences chairs and cars could give us a better evaluation than type 1 opinions. Embodied cognition can be classed as type 1 by its immediacy but it returns judgements based on quite a lot of information: when seated on a chair, our body tells us all about its affordances, from ergonomics and stability to tactile and thermal appreciation. Looking at the chair from all sides and in detail also tests our willingness to have it in our personal environment and see it daily next to other things we have and probably like.
So, the next time you visit a building, don't be an architectural tourist interested only in taking impressive photographs. Try to be more like a user: take your time to really experience the building in a practical sense, try to understand what the claims and principles of architects really mean - get out of your type 1 comfort zone and try to test your assumptions analytically. It can give you a different perspective to architecture that's truly good.
