beauty scale

A Scale of Beauty

After decades of being ignored, the concept of beauty, as understood by the non-architect, has recently been making a comeback in architecture, not so much in the practice itself, as in appeals for design solutions that are more human-centered and not dictated by abstract principles. Architectural beauty needs to be evaluated from its effects on human health. This study discusses …

neuro inflammation

Neuro Inflammation

It is estimated that residents in developed economies spend up to 95.6% of their time in or around the built environment. This trend towards increased architectural exposure has attracted considerable research, particularly concerning its effects on human health. However, there is still relatively little known about the impact of architectural form on the human brain. The field of neuroarchitecture has …

Scale of Beauty

Scale of Beauty

Alexandros A. Lavdas and Nikos A. Salingaros After decades of being ignored, the concept of beauty, as understood by the non-architect, has recently been making a comeback in architecture, not so much in the practice itself, as in appeals for design solutions that are more human-centered and not dictated by abstract principles. Architectural beauty needs to be evaluated from its effects on …

inhuman architecture

Inhuman Architecture

ChatGPT Identifies Inhuman Architecture — But Can We Please Stop Building It? Article by Nikos Salingaros Because of their training, architects are clueless about what happened. Most of them are ideologically committed to supporting stale design ideologies dating from the 1920s. Can we please fix this—for the good of humanity? Restructuring architectural education to teach discovered truths instead of design dogma is long …

allostatic overload

Allostatic Overload

This paper by Cleo Valentine examines the relationship between stress-inducing architectural features and allostatic overload. It draws on literature from neuroimmunology and neuroarchitecture. The studies reviewed from the field of neuroimmunology indicate that chronic or repeated exposure to stress-inducing events may overwhelm the body’s regulatory system, resulting in a process termed allostatic overload. While there is evidence from the field …

fire the architects

Fire the Architects!

Good news everyone! We can fire the architects! That much-hated subset of humanity who have inflicted banality and cheap unpleasantness on the rest of us for nearly a century can finally be chucked into the dustbin of history. As Nikos Salingaros reports in The Critic, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revealing what experts deny, exposing the stubborn ignorance of the architectural profession. Basically, humans don’t …

beauty scale

A Scale of Beauty

After decades of being ignored, the concept of beauty, as understood by the non-architect, has recently been making a comeback in architecture, not so much in the practice itself, as in appeals for design solutions that are more human-centered and not dictated by abstract principles. Architectural beauty needs to be evaluated from its effects on human health. This study discusses …

symmetry reassessment

Symmetry in Architecture: Reassessment

The topic of symmetry continues to be a dynamic and fruitful one in many fields—but architecture is not one of them. Indeed, as we have seen, architecture as a profession continues to be dominated by a school of thought that is charitably described as an obsolete relic of an earlier and more elementary industrial age. A more critical view is …