How 'Baukultur' can help build human-centred habitats

Architects and environmental designers have long struggled with the tension between art and science, beauty and utility, subjectivity and objectivity. But this tension – or perhaps more accurately, this liminal space – is where humanity thrives.

Recent research into cognitive neuroscience and environmental psychology reveals that how we create and care for our living environments – from buildings and communities to streets and landscapes – significantly impacts our thoughts and emotions and our behaviour, social interactions and physical well-being.

By integrating findings from these scientific disciplines, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, an architecture critic and former lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, builds on Winston Churchill's intuitive understanding that “we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us."

She and other evidence-based researchers make a compelling argument for why architects, urban planners, policymakers and developers need to design and build not on the edges of art or science, but within the liminal space between, especially as our world becomes increasingly urbanized.

Sustainability checklists, zoning laws and style guidelines have their place, but they can miss the mark, sometimes by a wide margin. Even after Goldhagen’s book, Welcome to Your World, was published in 2017, she commented in a 2021 interview: “I realized architects [still] didn’t know about human perception and cognition in the built environment. They might have intuitions about some parts of it. But very few appreciate how radical the shift must be and how much can be done to make things better.”

The idea that cognitive neuroscience and environmental psychology are intricately related to the human habitats we create – the ones we love or dislike, that endure or crumble from care or neglect – is deeply relevant to the nascent global initiative of the Davos Baukultur Alliance.

This multi-disciplinary and cross-sector membership organization, initiated by the Swiss Government in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, is based on the concept of baukultur (pronounced bow-cool-tour), a compound German word that translates to 'building culture.' It encapsulates a holistic approach to designing, building and maintaining human habitats with an emphasis on locally relevant building practices and the culture from which they emerge.

The Davos Baukultur Quality System requires going beyond purely functional, profitable or stylistic goals. The Davos Declaration, published in 2018, outlines eight criteria for creating high-quality places: governance, functionality, environment, economy, diversity, context, sense of place and beauty. These are the necessary considerations for creating places that endure because they are valued and resonate deeply with our cognitive, emotional and aesthetic needs and desires, which have evolved over millions of years in concert with natural ecosystems.

For thousands of years, people built 'vernacular' buildings and communities based on time-tested and culturally rooted knowledge using locally-sourced materials. But the Industrial Revolution and globalization enabled rapid urbanization, inexorably changing the way humans build and live.

In 1928, the American urbanist and architecture critic, Lewis Mumford, wrote, “We have still, I need hardly say, vast improvements to make in the science and art of community design, before the whole population will participate in these mechanical improvements, without a blasting sacrifice of other essential parts of a humane life.”

Subsequent critics, such as Jane Jacobs and William H Whyte, utilized close observation of people in the urban context to make the case for human-centred design in community planning. But these critiques were necessarily light on science-based research that could point the way forwards without going backwards.

Inevitably, glass and steel skyscrapers, eight-lane highways and suburban sprawl became signifiers of progress and wealth — a powerful cultural force that overwhelmed even the most articulate critics. In other words, to change the way we build, we must change the culture of building. This sentiment is at the heart of the Davos Baukultur Alliance.

An example of this idea being applied in practice is the placemaking initiative by the young people of Bandung, Indonesia. As part of the Safe and Sound Cities programme, they were given the opportunity to help reshape their neighbourhood. They chose to reactivate a space beneath the Pasopati Flyover, a city landmark, turning it into a film park, football field and events space. By reclaiming a piece of hostile and inhumane mid-century infrastructure and transforming it into a multi-functional inclusive public space, these young people felt empowered and more involved in their local community.

Christopher Alexander, a British architect and mathematician, came to similar conclusions from a different vantage point. His three-part book series, most notably A Pattern Language, argued that beauty in architecture and public spaces is not a superficial concern but the product of evolutionary patterns that are functional, aesthetically pleasing and deeply connected to the way people feel in their surroundings.

This framing was further advanced by one of Alexander’s many collaborators, Nikos Salingaros, a Greek-American Professor of Architecture and Mathematics at the University of Texas San Antonio. Salingaros applies ideas from network theory and fractal geometry to urban design and architecture. He argues that human environments should be based on natural forms and structures that align with the way our brains process space.

To this end, the Davos Baukultur Quality System balances the tension between human-centred design as an underlying structure with geographic, social and economic contexts. Here is where the Baukultur system’s criterion of governance comes into play.

Regulation is notoriously static and rigid. It doesn’t have to be this way. Dynamic regulatory systems have long existed in biology, but this concept is starting to influence governance structures. Incorporating human-centred design principles into dynamic regulatory frameworks could transform how people design the built environment and how it evolves and adapts to us – a burgeoning field of inquiry known as adaptive architecture.

While nearly everyone intuitively understands that the built environment can either promote or hinder individual and collective welfare, knowing something intuitively does not always translate to best practices. This is why Goldhagen makes a critical distinction between 'unconscious' and 'nonconscious' cognition.

Unconscious cognition is neither knowable nor accessible. Nonconscious cognition is knowable, but it is not usually accessed. “Most of our cognitions fall below the radar of conscious cognition,” she said in an interview. “A good deal of cognition—some experts put it as high as 90% — is nonconscious.”

The Davos Baukultur Alliance is, at its core, about making the nonconscious conscious through the eight criteria for achieving high-quality living environments. It is not a menu of items to pick and choose from, but a holistic approach that elevates our human need for livable places from the nonconscious to the intentional.