Man's Hidden Environment

Ever since Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden, man has known that his surroundings influence his behavior. The houses we live in, our offices, the space around us, the sounds that intrude on our daily lives, smells, colors, even the arrangement of furniture, determine many of our actions. (A well-known contemporary architect, for example, claimed that he could design a house that would guarantee a divorce for any couple who lived in it a month.)

Man obviously has evolved along with his environment, modifying it to suit his needs. But somewhere along the line, the process got out of hand; the technical side of modern civilization assumed a life of its own that no longer reflected the true needs of its users. Technology, in conquering nature, has surrounded us with a unique man-made environment, but for most of us, our physical comforts have made us ill at ease psychologically. And our psychological landscape has a profound effect on how we behave. For example:

The decor of a room can influence the speed at which we work. In an experiment at Brandeis University, lab assistants were assigned three rooms--"ugly," "beautiful" and "average"--for the purpose of giving tests. Examiners in the ugly room almost always finished their testing faster than those in the two other rooms. Moral: Beauty in the environment may not be a virtue if there is work to be done.

A change in the color of our surroundings changes the pattern of human movement. At the University of Kansas' art museum, investigators tested the effects of different-colored walls on two groups of visitors to an exhibition of prints. For the first group, the room was painted light beige; for the second, dark brown. Movement was traced by a switch mat under the carpet that electrically mapped the visitors' footsteps. It was found that those who entered the dark-brown room walked more quickly, covered more area and spent less time in the room than the people in the beige environment. For whatever reason, dark brown stimulated more activity, but the activity was concluded sooner.

Noise is an environmental variable that we take for granted, yet it profoundly affects our moods, our performance at work and even our dream life. One psychiatrist testified before a New York State legislative committee that the interruption of nighttime dreams by the jet rush of planes impaired the mental health of those who lived near Kennedy Airport. Dreams, he said, were broken off before they could unblock the repressions that were bottled up in the unconscious.

Until recently, it was assumed that sheer loudness was the culprit in noisy situations, but psychologists have concluded that unevenness of sound is more damaging. A factory going full blast on a programed schedule was judged quieter than a bank whose machines operated in fits and starts; the bank finally had to hire deaf people to reduce employee turnover.

At Columbia University, in an investigation of the effect of density on behavior, it was found that people working in an extremely crowded room performed just as efficiently as people who were not crowded. However, men under crowded conditions became competitive, suspicious and combative; whereas women were less competitive, more intimate and easier to get along with. In a follow-up experiment, the groups listened to taped courtroom cases and were asked to render verdicts of guilt or innocence. Results showed that men in a smaller, crowded room handed out more severe punishment than those who deliberated in a spacious environment. The women's verdicts, however, were not appreciably affected by the size or crowding of the room.

Sociologist-architect Kyoshi Izumi, at the University of Saskatchewan at Regina, says that the use of plastics to simulate wood, metal, leather, cloth--even plants--sets up an element of doubt in our sensing mechanism that is inconsistent with what we instinctively feel the environment ought to be. Subconsciously, we resist the synthetic world as we grope for the natural.

The sheer size of many buildings we live and work in and the sterility of much of the "overdesigned" modern architecture are defeating, too, because they make it difficult for us to involve ourselves with such superstructures in any meaningful way. This has been cited as the reason for the sabotage of Eero Saarinen's stunning but sterile CBS Building in New York by employees who cluttered and even defaced their offices in an effort to personalize their working space.

Monotony of decor, the endless corridors of large buildings, the rows of desks in an office suggest that we are on a treadmill and, in Izumi's words, adversely affect "comfortably perceived psychic time." For most people, Izumi thinks, time is measured visually; when there is an absence of clues, our sense of continuity is diminished and we "lose track of time."

Another theory holds that such "timeless" environments can make us anxious because we are unable to see a future--and that our environment must provide not only a future but a past and a present as well. Using hypnosis, Dr. Bernard Aaronson was able to induce various combinations of this time sense in a group of subjects and, in so doing, create abnormal states of mind. Suggesting no past, but only a future, brought on a manic condition. When no future was suggested, there was depression. The rapid build-up of gleaming, glass-walled schools and office buildings is believed by many psychologists to partly explain the existential anxiety so pervasive in the industrial nations. Such ultramodern structures cut us off from the familiar, human milieu of our childhood. This appears to be particularly true of buildings that depart from square or rectangular form. In his study of the radially designed French Radio and Television headquarters in Paris, psychiatrist Paul Sivadon found an abnormal degree of depression among the personnel. One reason for this, he concluded, was that the long circular corridors, by blocking orientation with the outside environment, create feelings of insecurity. A lack of intersecting corridors also contributes to the sense of being trapped; people don't know where they are at any given moment.

Until the early 1960s, most of what we knew about human responses to outside stimuli came from laboratory experiments or was extrapolated from the behavior of animals. Ivan Pavlov's famous conditioned-reflex theory was based on his work with dogs. By ringing a bell during feeding periods, the Russian scientist conditioned his animals to salivate when the bell was rung, even if there was no food. (George Bernard Shaw, when told of this experiment, remarked, "If they had brought me this problem, I could have given them the same answer without torturing a single dog.")

The shortcoming of the behaviorist approach--whose most persuasive spokesman today is Harvard educator B. F. Skinner--is its extremely narrow view of man's relationship to his physical environment. For most of us, it's not so much the carrot and the stick that influence our actions (although they may play a part) but the constantly shifting physical and social surroundings in which we live and work. In a sense, the environment serves as a "magnetic field" of subtle and wideranging psychological forces that we, in turn, modify by the way we interact with it.

Moreover, the environment we observe is not necessarily the "real" environment; depending on our personality, our ethnic background or simply our mood, what we perceive may be a distortion of what actually exists. In Los Angeles, when asked to map the city from memory, students at UCLA saw it as a whole. For the black residents of Watts, however, the important landmarks were the county hospital and the city jail, where so many of them had been taken after the riots. In the jargon of sociology, their perception of the city was culturally biased.

All of us at some time look at the environment through the distorting lenses of anger, annoyance and frustration. At Ohio State University, students were asked to estimate the distance from the campus to various points in Columbus. Surprisingly, newcomers were remarkably accurate, but students familiar with the city greatly overestimated the number of miles to the central business section. Impatience with traffic lights and stop signs, and the frayed nerves from downtown driving, had made the distance seem farther than it was.

We know that the prick of a needle in our hand brings an immediate reflex--a withdrawal from pain. A blinding flash of light will make us close our eyes. These are simple, protective responses to "unfriendly" stimuli. But we are only beginning to learn how people adapt to less obvious changes. At the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, psychologists have created an ingenious "perception" room to discover how people act in a physical setting with which they have had no previous experience. It includes a welter of sights and sounds that have no obvious relationship to one another, yet all of which compete for attention.

As a volunteer subject, I found myself in a dim 18' x 26' room surrounded by aluminized mirrors that vibrated at various frequencies as I approached them. Gargoylelike reflections were thrown back at me; strobe lights flashed weirdly at my feet; the mirrors gave off a low, rumbling sound and pictures were cast onto the (continued on page 222)Hidden Environment (continued from 110) walls from overhead slide projectors. The entire ensemble was programed and driven by a central console in an adjacent room, and my reactions--startled movements, sustained interest, avoidance, random explorations--were recorded on a cylinder-and-pen device similar to an electrocardiograph. Essentially, this instrument traced two things: (1) how long I remained in front of a given mirror, with its accompanying bombardment of lights, sounds and images; and (2) whether my response to this contradictory information--moving closer, shielding my eyes, deactivating the sound by moving farther away, etc.--favored one means of perception over another.

The psychologists at City University are still cautious about their findings, but here are some promising theories: When we are subjected to several competing stimuli, we tend to convert them into a single sensory message. In short, we translate the information into our strongest suit. Artists and other visually minded people "see" sound and describe it in terms of light and color; musicians "hear" paintings and strobe lights and sense a rhythmic, even a melodic, pattern in them. The experiments suggest that people who can perceive their surroundings by thus translating from one sense to another maintain a longer interest in the environment and find more meaning in it.

What are the practical values of all these theories? Urban planners are learning that if man is to be psychologically comfortable, he must be able to make sense out of the clutter of city life. Knowing in advance how we respond to sounds, lights, open spaces, the varieties of buildings and street layouts--what our behavioral expectations of the urban environment are--helps us create the kinds of neighborhoods we want. In some instances, planners use play money in a Monopolylike game to determine what it is that residents of a community value most about their physical environment. In Boston, designer Michael Southworth blindfolds his subjects and has them pushed around in wheelchairs while they dictate their auditory impressions into tape recorders. Southworth divides their reactions into feelings of "sonic distress" and "sonic delight" for the guidance of planners who seek to reduce unwanted sound.

In most cases, however, the new psychodesign is empirical. San Francisco architect Piero N. Patri moves into his housing developments for a month or so to test their livability. He keeps an anthropologist on his staff because he is convinced that ethnic culture influences housing preferences. Recently, before starting a low-income urban-renewal project, Patri organized an encounter group in which prospective tenants (mostly black) confronted architects and designers (all white) in a marathon session that sought to uncover the life style of those who would occupy the buildings. The session brought out the bottled up hostility of the prospective tenants: "Don't give us another high-rise slum," they said, in effect. "We deserve better." Result: an attractive development of three-story, individually designed town houses that are a radical departure for the ghetto. Patri believes that many large housing projects are turned into slums because tenants lack a sense of "turf." Like their middle-class counterparts in the new office buildings, they mess up such developments in an attempt to assert their individuality.

The mentally ill are especially sensitive to their surroundings, and much of what we've learned about the designed environment has been discovered in the psychiatric ward. Several years ago, Izumi was hired to plan a psychiatric center in Yorkton, Saskatchewan. Among his impressions: The ward's physical environment created too much ambiguity in the minds of the patients. Free-hanging clocks seemed to defy gravity; transoms suggested guillotines about to fall; polished-terrazzo surfaces and uniformity of design confused the patients' sense of time and space.

Izumi's plans for Yorkton were finally scaled to the psychic boundaries of the patients and design was used to reinforce a feeling of security and intimacy in a complex of several small, rectangular buildings. All the structural elements were familiar, Izumi stressed, and there were no illusory qualities of the kinds that architects so often try to achieve in striving to make things seem what they aren't. He would minimize ambiguity in the environment even for healthy people, since, in his opinion, all of us tense up in the face of uncertainty.

Another behavioral scientist, Dr. Humphry Osmond, contrasts "sociopetal" space--that which draws people together--with "sociofugal" space, which pushes them apart. A New England common is sociopetal; a row of glassed-in cubicles is usually sociofugal. If you want privacy, you seek out the latter, but not all common areas are necessarily socializing. One of the puzzles that confronted a team of psychologists was why patients in multibed rooms in a psychiatric ward were more passive in their behavior than those in small rooms. In mapping patient activity, the team found that in the larger rooms, occupants spent from two thirds to three fourths of their time lying on their beds, either asleep or awake. But in smaller two-bed rooms, patients were socially interactive. It was concluded that what really matters is the freedom of choice permitted the patient in what he does; the more people in a room, the less chance each has to pursue his own activities. Without choice, one tends to withdraw.

Observations of the outside world also confirm this. A comparison of large and small schools showed that although there were more opportunities for varied activities in the bigger institutions, there was more individual participation in the smaller ones. Ideal space may be that which permits us to maintain our privacy while interacting with others, for we are social in small groups. Robert Sommer, a psychologist at the University of California at Davis, believes there is a spatial behavior that influences many of our actions. He observed that in restaurants, people are more likely to talk across the corner of a table than if sitting opposite or side by side. The shape of the table also makes a difference. Those with straight sides help define our boundaries and make us more confident and assertive. Round tables seem to promote equality and uncertainty. Men will seldom sit side by side if they are given a chance to sit opposite, but women prefer sitting next to each other.

Additionally, in a study of the seating arrangements of school children in 4000 classrooms, it was found that half the pupils with chronic infections and two thirds of those with nutritional problems occupied seats in the darkest quadrant of the rooms. Sommer suggests that social disadvantage and physical impairment probably led these children to select--or be assigned to--inferior space. In all behavior, there is a strong desire to stake out a turf that's appropriate to our self-image. Moreover, the milieu helps dictate the role we play in it. That we act like students when we are in school, are reverential in church and lackadaisical in parks is because these environments tell us in advance how to behave.

A revealing example of this occurred when the Napa State Hospital in California was heavily damaged by the earthquake of 1906. To the surprise of the authorities, when the psychiatric patients were moved into tents and were no longer walled in, their behavior and cooperation improved measurably. Epileptics undergoing treatment experienced fewer fits and, in general, the tent colony seemed to benefit everyone, even the staff. But when the buildings were restored, behavior returned to normal--patients became difficult and the epileptics had more fits. Psychiatrists concluded that in any environment, there are standards of behavior to which people adhere simply because it's what's expected of them.

Whether space is friendly or alien often depends upon size and layout. Parks, for example, bring people together on a casual basis, but they also promote distancing for those who want to be alone, and they are ideal for lovers who seek a public setting in which to advertise their private feelings. Formal gardens, on the other hand, impose formal conduct; the landscaping discourages social interaction. Contrary to what one might expect, private outdoor space is more socializing than communal space. Residents of a postwar housing development near Coventry, England, fraternized more with their neighbors when they met in each other's yards; families that were compelled to share a common garden actually knew fewer neighbors. In suburbs and small towns, people are more likely to talk across their back yards if the property line is indicated by a fence. Because this boundary helps them maintain territoriality, it actually brings neighbors closer together.

If both privacy and social interaction are necessary ingredients of human behavior, how do we arrange our territory to gain the optimum values of each? Environmentalists see this as a problem in spatial separation, and they've had a field day working out the answers. Here are some of their findings:

In a study made in Topeka, Kansas, the Environmental Research and Development Foundation compared the effects of high-rise and garden apartments on the behavior of their occupants. Results showed that, proportionately, the low-rise tenants made twice as many friends inside their building area as did the high-rise tenants. Moreover, in the taller structures, people exhibited greater feelings of indifference and withdrawal, while garden-apartment dwellers were more involved in politics, civic life, etc., and enjoyed a greater sense of power over their lives.

A study in Germany compared the health of wives and children of British soldiers living in separate houses with the health of those in apartment buildings. The differences were startling. Among the latter group, the illness rate was 57 percent higher, with neuroses showing a markedly greater incidence. And within the apartment buildings, the rates of neuroses varied directly with the distance from the ground floor: Higher apartments seemingly created more social isolation. In short, the effect of mass housing is not crowding but loneliness.

In explaining this paradox, architect Christopher Alexander of the Center for Environmental Structure in Berkeley, California, posits another: It isn't stress itself that causes the ills of urban life, he says, but the turning away from it. "Stress forces people to withdraw into themselves [and] creates more people who believe in self-sufficiency as an ideal, making intimate contact seem less necessary." Alexander would "bring people out of hiding" through an ingenious geometric city of transparent houses, open courtyards and private connecting spaces, all buried just below the surface of the earth in clusters of 28 buildings. In a sense, he would bury people to encourage intimacy.

Reminiscent of a Pueblo cliff dweller's setup, Alexander's utopia has yet to be constructed, but the theory of forced contact may not be as crazy as it seems. Robert K. Merton analyzed families who lived on opposite sides of a street. He found that 75 percent of the people who had doors facing the front made contact with their across-the-street neighbors. Of those who didn't, only four percent became friends.

Crowding as an environmental variable is only beginning to be seriously examined, and the data so far is inconclusive. Much of what we know about the subject on a hypothetical level can be traced to Dr. John B. Calhoun's experiments with Norwegian rats. Calhoun, who is a research psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health, demonstrated that when rats in confinement exceed a certain density, they undergo radical changes in behavior. Some become homosexual; others become aggressive; yet others simply lie down and die. Many ecologists have concluded from this that there is an upper limit to man's own tolerance for crowding, quite apart from his demands on the natural resources. Calhoun believes that, based on the total ecological picture, the optimum world population is nine billion, but he sees little hope that the increase can be stopped before it reaches 13.5 billion.

This need not be fatal, however. There is a good chance that many of the adverse effects noted in the crowding experiments--the combative behavior of men, the morbid effects on animals--are really the result of confinement. When people are free to escape--via the automobile, for instance--high density is more tolerable. And whether we feel crowded often depends upon the social setting. At a cocktail party, people bunch up intentionally to get in on the action. But a golf course is crowded if a foursome 200 yards away is holding up the play. The important thing is not how many people live on an acre of land but how they arrange themselves on it and for what purpose.

There does appear to be a relationship between spatial separation and our proneness to antisocial behavior. A study made in France found a direct correlation between living space, crime and other social problems among the urban working class. The optimum turf proved to be from 85 to 130 square feet per person. When space was less than 85, social pathology doubled. Above 130 square feet, the disorders also increased, although not so drastically.

If high density is a factor in crime and disease, Hong Kong should be a prize example. It is the most densely populated city in the world, containing up to 2000 people per acre (compared with 450 in Boston and New York). As many as four or five families occupy the same apartment on a shift basis. Yet, except for tuberculosis, its inhabitants appear to be healthier than Americans, and far more law-abiding. A survey based on census figures for 1961 showed 9.3 deaths per 1000 population in the United States and 5.9 in Hong Kong. Fewer than one tenth as many Hong Kong residents were hospitalized for psychiatric disorders as in the U. S. (partly, no doubt, because of fewer diagnostic and treatment facilities, although the discrepancy is nevertheless startling). Our figures for murder and manslaughter were six times as high and that for all serious crimes combined was double. Yet when new housing was made available to some Hong Kong families, many of them sublet space in their tiny apartments to others.

Why these disparities exist isn't entirely clear, but we can speculate that abundant public-health care and the highly organized Chinese family help keep a damper on the runaway problems of urban life. Orientals, too, have a higher involvement ratio than do most white Americans (so, for that matter, do southern Europeans and American blacks), hence they survive comfortably in environments that we consider intolerable. The Japanese have adapted to high densities by leaving their cities chaotic and unplanned while beautifying the interiors of their homes.

One of the dilemmas encountered by urban planners in this country is why uprooted slum dwellers often move to another slum rather than into new housing projects elsewhere in the city. Studies have shown that many of these ethnic groups are quite happy to be crowded. Professor Izumi thinks that ghettos are environmentally permissive in that they offer a freer range of choice. In the planned community of Brasilia, the new capital of Brazil, it is the older, "free city" of the working classes to which other residents flee to experience spontaneity and excitement--the same reason that suburban New Yorkers flock to Manhattan.

The new towns of Europe, with their unified design and careful landscaping, apparently induce a degree of apathy in their inhabitants that is not experienced in the urban "jungle." Last year, a team of educators in West Germany conducted an experiment in self-expression among young children living in three new towns and three older cities. Comparing their paintings and drawings, the researchers found that whereas the city child was stimulated by his environment, the new-town child tended to be unimaginative and bland. They concluded that for the latter, the overplanned character of the surroundings inhibited his natural curiosity and blunted his creativity.

By the year 2000, 80 percent of the American people will live in cities; world-wide, during this time, as many buildings will be erected as have gone up in all recorded history. Most environmentalists agree that the one thing our cities will not be is futuristic--at least in appearance. They are far more likely to be complex and cluttered than simple and orderly, although the clutter will be there with a purpose. Planners are thinking less in terms of efficiency than of the mental image the city projects onto its inhabitants. The new urban aesthetic, some believe, will avoid the traditional lines of scale and perspective in favor of how people go about their daily business. In brief, cities will probably be built around the behavioral needs of the inhabitants, rather than as monuments to their architects.

If the environmentalists have their way, we will carve up our cities to give residents a greater sense of belonging. Smaller schools and parks, more intimately designed public areas, promenades to break up the sameness of block layouts, more regard for the unique character of the neighborhoods--all this will help us personalize space. Nor will institutions be quite as institutional-looking in the future. In Boston, a new pediatrics hospital is being built in a cluster arrangement around open courtyards and "floated" over a shopping plaza. What might have been a threatening superstructure to young patients will be a decentralized complex that's part of a familiar neighborhood. Los Angeles architect C. M. Deasy, in redesigning an obsolescent school in a black area, put a public sidewalk through the grounds as a means of bringing the local community into closer contact with the school, thus giving the citizens a better idea of what's going on behind the fences. As a result, most of the friction between outsiders and school staff has disappeared. In housing projects, there will be participatory planning like Piero Patri's, with the occupants helping decide the environmental mix.

Can we eliminate the noise of the city? The Federal Council of Scientists reports a doubling of the environmental sound level every ten years, and at this rate, the decibels may become lethal. No doubt, legislation will intervene first, but not all noise will go away. Some of the most imaginative planning in sonic design is being done by Michael Southworth, who not merely would fight noise but wants to beat it at its own game. He would use symbolic sounds to inform pedestrians of such things as the weather and approaching buses. Street criers would relay public information; in squares and parks, large, animated sculptures would make sounds when people moved around them; and in ugly areas, sequences of different floor materials would squeak, rumble, squish or pop to provide interest when walked upon. Where there is visual monotony, Southworth says, add new sounds, such as splashing water fountains, bells and boat horns.

Fanciful? Probably, but it indicates one way the psychodesigners are trying to make a world in which we will feel at home. It's not simply the destruction of natural resources we must be concerned with now and in the future; we must also create an environment that can allow us to become more human.