An Old Post Repeated: A Sense of Well Being

I'm getting a lot of hits becaue of my Wall Street Journal review, so I've put here a related post from the past. Two more are here and here, and there are more over in the column on the left.

A room from Dashwood House, my favorite room at the Metropolitan Museum

What I want from architecture and urbanism is a feeling of well being. The feeling I get from the streets of South Kensington, Central Park, Fallingwater, and my favorite period room at the Met.

This is not because of theory, or what I was taught in school. It's why I knew I wanted to be an architect when I was 9 years old.

It is why I usually don't like the work of Rem Koolhaas or Peter Eisenman. Koolhaas's Eurolille made me feel bad, although that wasn't true of his IIT building. I may be in London next week, and if so I will go to see Daniel Libeskind's new Graduate Center at Metropolitan University (see an interesting comment by the BBC, below*), to see how it feels.

In a post on my Top Ten Houses, I wrote,

Sometimes while visiting historic houses, I immediately feel at home. At Lord Burlington's Chiswick, which has no furniture, I had the feeling that all I needed was a mattress, some books and a reading lamp, and I would be happy moving in that day. Fallingwater was a little different: I only wanted to stay for the weekend, but then that's what the Kauffman's built it for. I thought it was the greatest party house ever built.

Chris Alexander has taken an interesting position on architecture and the importance of emotion in his four-volume work The Nature of Order, and I hope to see him next week in a conference at the Prince's Foundation. Now Yodan Rofé, a former student of Alexander's who teaches in Israel has put an interesting study on the web about urbanism and feeling:

In my doctoral research I did something very low-tech and distributed maps of a neighborhood to all homes. The maps were not all identical, and gave about a 1/4 mile square of area around each home. There was much overlap between these maps as i didn't want to force people's definition of their neighborhood. I asked people to walk around in the area they consider their neighborhood, and write down their feeling on a 4 level scale: 1- Very Good; 2 - Good; 3 - Bad; 4 - Very Bad. I then transferred these evaluations to a combined map, thus receiving a composite feeling map of the area.

Statistically analyzing the maps I could discern areas where people tended to feel better, and where worse. Another interesting aspect was that it is not very labor intensive, because you can get a statistically reliable picture (that is one that captures probably all the variation in the population), in a sample size of 2-3 people per block.

Read all about it in my recently published article on Planum.

BTW, it's interesting that theory would lead me to choose a different room than the one above. Maybe an American room, or the Adam room from the Lansdowne House. I like that one better in photos, and in the photo above don't particularly like the ornament. But I feel a sense of well being there, more than in any of the other rooms at the Met.

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