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“Artistic images seem to address directly our existential sense, and have their impact through our bodily being, before they are cerebrally registered or understood. And artistic work may have a forceful mental and emotional impact, yet remain forever without an intellectual explanation”.
Juhani Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image 1
Our senses and perception cross the boundary between us and our immediate surroundings and somehow simultaneously heighten our awareness of this boundary, bringing us back into ourselves and our lived experiences.
In our perception of sound, for example, certain tones in music can uplift or sadden us, and when accompanied by words, they take on another layer of effect, one that is culturally coded and relies on the interpretation and association of words to meaning and eventually back to feeling. Instrumental or classical music can be akin to abstract art, while songs with words and a narrative can be likened to figurative art. Architecture straddles both, the abstract and the narrative, as it engages the sensorial and the cognitive, the subconscious and the conscious, the experiential and the symbolic, the natural and the fabricated, the universal and the culturally specific. The ways in which environments affect the individual and the society and shape our behavior has been the study of anthropologists, neuroscientists, environmental behaviorists and architects, and has served political figures, regimes, and religious institutions for some time.
Resonant spaces are spaces that reflect us and address us, simultaneously as individuals and as a cultural collective. They are spaces that are not indifferent to us. Rather than spaces of dominance, power and authority which are designed to make one feel small, powerless, insignificant and with no agency, they are spaces that are defined by our interpretations and our perceptions, by both mind and matter.
As architects that work across the world in very diverse cities and contexts, questions related to the universal and culturally specific effect of environments on people have been a central theme in our work. There are universals that very few will question; for example, our attraction to daylight or to nature (with the rise of biophilic design as testament). These environmental factors have been the subject of scientific studies with quantifiable outcomes.2 Less commonly known is the work of neuroscientists interested in the effects of esthetics and architecture on the human brain, mind and body. This study of the intersection of brain sciences and the arts was first coined “neuroaesthetics” in the late 1990s by Semir Zeki, renowned neuroscientist and professor at the University College of London. Pioneering in this field is Anjan Chatterjee, professor of neurology, psychology, and architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and the founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, who has outlined three qualities of spaces that are perceived as beautiful and affect well-being, with some variability by populations. The first is coherence: how organized and legible a space or work of architecture is. The second is fascination: how intriguing and rich it is and whether it triggers an interest to explore it. The third is “hominess”: how comfortable one feels in a space and whether it fosters a sense of belonging.3
One might too hastily qualify coherence as a “universal”, in that it activates cognitive mechanisms of spatial manipulation and navigation that are hard-wired in the human brain. Our spatial understanding and the ability to mentally map an object and navigate space are more similar than different in most people and fall within a certain range deemed as normal brain function. However, this too is dependent on lived experiences of the person perceiving the space; an architect or taxi driver may have developed different cognitive abilities, indeed a different brain, than a poet or physician. The second quality, fascination, engages both bodily, haptic perception as well as cognitive understanding of a space. It recalls memories, both sensory and verbal, and triggers imagination. The last quality, hominess, is also rather complex and nuanced. It falls into the category of what we might consider as culturally specific, yet it certainly holds aspects that can be deemed universal or primal to a certain extent such as physical comfort; here too with some individual specificity and variations.
How we define hominess, and, by extension, belonging, is the subject of much reflection throughout my design process and across projects in our studio, which are embedded in diverse contexts and cultures. Moreover, the definitions of belonging for an individual and a collective are likely to differ. An individual’s sense of belonging might come upon less consciously than a community’s. For an individual, it is based on that person’s lived experience, memory and cultural background which could be very complex and multi-faceted: a unique collage of narratives that make up how we identify and what we identify with. For a community, it operates in a somewhat more conscious manner. The community might seek it and recognize a narrative or a symbol that has some significance to the group, and subsequently leverage its resonance for a common bond. It is a feeling that emerges through association with words, symbols, meaning and a narrative. In more stable and homogeneous communities, the individual and the collective’s sense of belonging may largely overlap. In transient, temporal communities, such as a student cohort living and studying on a university campus for a limited number of years, the need for an identifier that resonates with the group and the individual simultaneously, binding them together to a place and time, gains a lot of significance. I have drawn from KPF’s academic campuses and workplace adaptive reuse projects as ideal grounds to explore these notions.
As we embarked on the design of the University Activity Center (UAC) for the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), the question of resonance and belonging came into focus from the beginning. This new campus, which KPF master planned, is the first foray for a Hong Kong-based university on mainland China, in Guangzhou. It aimed to attract a student body from across East Asian countries and beyond. The University wanted the architecture of the campus to embody its mission of progress, innovation, and sustainability. The UAC was intended as a place where students could socialize, reset and restore their faculties in between classes and research work, and most importantly, a space of belonging which could be thought of as a “third place”, a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg 4 to describe a place that is not one’s home or work, but a place that resonates with a person or a collective and holds a special significance for them, where they can socialize or daydream with agency to do so.
Our hope was that the building and its spaces would operate on both the universal and the culturally specific aspects of experience, on mind and matter, and in doing so, would effectively resonate with this student body simultaneously as individuals and as a community.
The design process, for me, is never didactic or linear. It too, in a mirror-fashion to the experience of space, comes from a deep archive of memories and experiential moments that are stored along the way and over the years. Looking back and in an attempt to describe the building, it is however helpful to analyze it through Chatterjee’s three key qualities identified above.
Coherence: As a symbol of growth, progress and life across East Asian countries, the bamboo shoot emerged as a motif for the design of the UAC and lent us a language for the architecture that informed the façade texture and color as well as the overall gesture and spirit of the building. The building emerges from the ground as a landscape form, acting as a counterpoint to the adjacent orthogonal and rationally planned lab buildings. All architectural elements relate to biophilic design concepts, one echoing and reinforcing the other, and forming a cohesive understanding of the building. Inspired by the linear growth of bamboo, the façade is developed in a gradation of green tones, pixelated as they rise from the ground up. Natural light streams into the main double-height entry space from glazing that telegraphs the rising form of the exterior sloping roof, connecting inside and out experientially and at once mentally, fostering an embodied understanding of the building form.
Fascination: The long and narrow site threatened to yield relentless long corridors without much interest. In response, we developed the plan with a fluid, meandering stream-like circulation path that runs along the entire length of the building, constantly shifting one’s perspective. In doing so, one is gently pulled to explore the path further and discover what is “around the bend” while pockets of intimate spaces, enriched with texture and color in the furnishings, are carved along the way, holding one’s attention momentarily.
Hominess: As a restorative space in between the rigors of research and study, and a space of belonging for students individually and collectively, the UAC acts as a third place. Belonging is fostered through both spatial manipulations and materiality. A sense of agency underlines the experience as a variety of sizes and types of spaces are provided allowing students to find what suits their needs best on any given day or time of day. Spaces for individual reflection, for informal small group gatherings, or more organized larger group activities are integrated by a natural palette of materials and textures. The natural world being one that more likely resonates with us all,5 this unifying materiality and language connects people to the built environment and to each other in that space. As a collective, the student body can identify this building as a place of community and one that holds a symbolic value associated with the mission of the university and the reason these students have chosen to be there. On an individual level, we hope the building offers a place of respite and both physical, social and mental restoration that gives the students the necessary reset to continue with their demanding days.
In a very different context, that of New York City’s historic James A. Farley Post Office Building; and with a different user group, that of a tech-giant’s employees, we recognized similar needs for a sense of belonging, both as the sense of being welcome in the space but also invested and connected to the workplace environment. In a large office hub with transient employees operating on a flexible schedule, a sense of community for both individual and collective belonging was challenging to achieve.
Anchoring the design in the landmarked spaces and elements of the historic building, here too, we aimed to create a third place, within the workplace itself, that holds meaning for its diverse user group. We found opportunities through specific interventions in the various parts of the 65,032-sq. m office. One example is that of the landmarked elevator lobbies. We transformed these spaces, where the elevators were decommissioned, into a library reading room and its elevator shafts into individual reading nooks. This moment of “fascination” and “delight” was also specifically designed to address individual comfort and hominess with the simple accommodation for a person to manually adjust the reading light or rearrange the pillows. These small gestures allow people to feel a sense of agency that reflects positively on their attachment to a place. The intimacy and small scale of the nook, the opening without a door and the bookcase wall that allow views out in both directions give a sense of what behavioral psychologists call prospect and refuge 6:
the primitive sense of protection and enclosure that is held simultaneously with the ability to see out and have a visual grasp over the context or horizon. In the primitive context, this is akin to looking out from a cave on top of a hill onto the valley beneath or, in a more current urban context, this is like being at a comfortable window seat in one’s home and looking out over the city street. This “me-time” space within the vast office of the Farley space, which occupies the equivalent of two full New York City blocks, gives one a sense of autonomy and also of belonging. This moment allows one to grasp their position and presence as an individual within a large collective. It simultaneously catalyzes a culturally significant place and a physical attachment to this place.
“Cohesiveness” here is allied to natural wayfinding, much needed given the wide expanse of the space, and achieved through a central vertical circulation organized around a pair of connected atria that are filled with daylight and plants of varying scales. Similar to the UAC but connecting the spaces vertically, rather than horizontally, a sense of fascination unfolds along this interior landscape promenade, where one finds pockets of seating in a range of configurations, from stepped amphitheater-like seats to lounge chairs around a coffee table. The universal attractors here are the connection to light and living plants, or biophilia.
I would venture that spaces that resonate with us deeply both individually and collectively have more to do with our intrinsic humanity than with elements that rely solely on interpretation through words or symbols. However, attaining that state of mind where perception and connection to one’s surroundings is unmediated, resonant, becomes more and more difficult in the cities and worlds we have constructed around us; be it the current state of our built environment as much as our distancing from it through social media, smart phones, and virtual reality.
Paradoxically, the intellectual explanations or interpretations we bring to works in the forms of culturally specific symbols and narratives, might operate as a key or a portal that allows us to enter the realm of the abstract and the phenomenological, in fact, through that of the symbolic and culturally specific. Perhaps, the narrative or symbolic is the “bait” that gets a passer-by to linger for a few more seconds in a space, long enough to begin to allow the qualities of that space to take effect on them, and to begin to resonate with them. In the same way that some lyrics might entice a listener, untrained in music, to listen for a few more minutes.
How can architecture extend a fleeting moment to forge a bond between us and our cultural and physical world in ways that reflect and empower us? Resonance, as defined here, can foster this attachment to place. It is the live feedback loop that makes us feel our presence in the world, our embodied existence, our sense of self in a particular context. Without this feeling, our built environment would have no significance to us and both cultural and environmental sustainability would dissolve. I leave the reader with a quote by Bachelard that has inspired much of this reflection.
“After the original reverberation, we are able to experience resonances, sentimental repercussions, reminders of our past. But the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface”.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space 7
1 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Embodied Image (Hoboken NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 64
2 Roger S. Ulrich, Robert F. Simons, Barbara D. Losito, Evelyn Fiorito, Mark A. Miles, and Michael Zelson, “Stress Recovery during Exposure to Natural and Urban Environments”, Journal of Environmental Psychology 11 (1991): 201-230 – https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-4944(05)80184-7
3 Adam B. Weinberger, Alexander P. Christensen, Alexander Coburn, and Anjan Chatterjee, “Psychological Responses to Buildings and Natural Landscapes”, Journal of Environmental Psychology 77 (2021) – https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2021.101676
4 Ray Oldenburg, Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories about the “Great Good Places” at the Heart of Our Communities (New York City: Marlowe & Company, 2001)
5 Weinberger, Christensen, Coburn, and Chatterjee, “Psychological Responses”
6 Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (Hoboken NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, 1975)
7 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), xxiii
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