NEWS INDEX Archives 2004 May

Authors hope book serves as primer for more humane built environment

Melissa Mitchell, News Editor
217-333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

5/20/04

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Joy Monice Malnar and Frank Vodvarka hope their new book might help bring mainstream architects to their senses – literally.

The book, “Sensory Design” (University of Minnesota Press), was conceived by Malnar, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Vodvarka, a design professor at Loyola University, as a primer for architects, designers, students and others interested in exploring ways to make the world’s built environment more humane. To do so, they say, requires going beyond the traditional, visual aesthetic, and designing with the full spectrum of human senses in mind.

In the book, the husband-and-wife collaborators maintain that the existing built environment – particularly anything designed and constructed in the last two centuries – has reflected an empirical, scientific approach to architecture that emphasizes formal design principles. Excluded from that approach – or typology, as it is defined in design terms – is any focus on sensory data.

“This is not surprising,” Malnar and Vodvarka wrote. “Formal design principles lend themselves to being successfully taught, and thus perpetuated in the academics. Certain 20th century design movements have found the essentially abstract, impersonal character of formal aesthetics ideologically appropriate. But another reason concerns the perceived difficulty in verifying, much less codifying, principles of sensory response. As opposed to the formal structures of cognition, the senses seem unreliable as design parameters to the architectural community.”

Nonetheless, Malnar and Vodvarka have developed various charts, schematics and design tools, such as their Sensory Slider, in an attempt to assign values to certain sensory factors.

The Sensory Slider features eight bars, each of which can be manipulated to measure the intensity assigned to a particular sense. Malnar said the tool can be applied to a building or space to chart its sensory characteristics in an analytic manner, “although it is our hope that the Slider will be used in the predesign stage of planning.”

In an example in the book, the authors used the Slider to compare and contrast two existing Chicago buildings constructed in two distinctly different architectural eras: the Rookery, designed in 1885 by Daniel H. Burnham and John W. Root; and 333 Wacker Drive, designed in 1979 by Kohn Pedersen Fox (with Perkins and Will).

In evaluating buildings, Malnar said, “the Sensory Slider does not provide an exact, right/wrong answer (about their design).” Instead, she said, “It triggers you to think about things. For instance, could I nudge this design so I can activate this sense in a more powerful way? I see it as a tool, or reminder, to focus attention in one way or another.”

Malnar used the book as a base for a course she taught this past semester on “Sensory Design in the Built Environment.” And while she hopes it will be adopted as a classroom text by other instructors, the book was written with a broader audience in mind.

“It could be used by anyone involved in some aspect of design,” she said. “It will help explain the designed world you live in, and give you additional information to improve it.”

Among other things, the book’s content includes discussions of how light, color, sound, texture, fragrance and other sensory cues can be invoked for positive or negative design effect. In a chapter titled “Objects of Our Lives,” the authors even touch on the emotional benefits of outfitting homes with art, photographs, mirrors, souvenirs and all manner of knick-knacks and bric-a-brac that define personal style and identity.

Throughout, Malnar and Vodvarka weave in yarns from well-known writers, along with multiple references to and theories from influential philosophers, educators, historians, and scientists. Opening with Henry James’ written impressions of the garden at Villa Medici, the authors close with a conversation between Alice and the Cheshire Cat, excerpted from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.”

Why all the literary references, philosophy, science and educational theory in a book about architecture and design?

“I believe that as human beings we’re complex,” Malnar said. “We live in architecture and architecture needs to recognize that complexity to adapt and make lives full so we can use all our experience. We have so many senses, so many fields … it doesn’t make sense to focus on just one.

“What I was trying to do was compile a lot of people’s work in one text,” with the hope that “designers could start incorporating into their work ideas about designing with the senses in mind.”

Malnar concedes that the book also has been a fascinating, intellectual
dot-connecting exercise for her and for Vodvarka.

“We like to make connections among related areas of information,” she said. “We especially like to form links among scientific studies on sensory response – architects don’t generally delve into scientific journals – and those journals that designers and architects do look at, and interweave that information. That way, people who read the book can find what interests them, and hopefully use the information to improve our built environment.”