Just a moment...

same: the realization that space is designed to elicit particular responses.

He encouraged looking at people’s expressed preferences and behaviours—for example, drawing on where people actually chose to gather in a home, perhaps in a corner that caught the sun, or how they used public spaces—rather than an architect’s assumptions about how the city should be built.

Because we allow the design of spaces to direct, inform, and control our behaviors, emotions, and experiences in spaces, we likely translate that same affordance from the design of spaces to the design of digital technologies.

There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Cathedral Effect.2 Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking. When we are in a space with high ceilings, for example—think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invoking the grandeur of heaven—we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a roo

Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wal