Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow ( Katie Brady/Flickr )

At a particular moment during every tour of Georgetown’s campus, it becomes necessary for the student guide to acknowledge the singular blight in an otherwise idyllic environment.  

“Lauinger Library was designed to be a modern abstraction of Healy Hall”: a sentence that inevitably trails off with an apologetic shrug, inviting the crowd to arrive at their own conclusions about how well it turned out. Much of the student population would likely agree that the library’s menacing figure on the quad is nothing short of soul-crushing. New research conducted by a team of architects and neuroscientists suggests that architecture may indeed affect mental states, although they choose to focus on the positive.

I spoke with Dr. Julio Bermudez, the lead of a new study that uses fMRI to capture the effects of architecture on the brain. His team operates with the goal of using the scientific method to transform something opaque—the qualitative “phenomenologies of our built environment”—into neuroscientific observations that architects and city planners can deliberately design for. Bermudez and his team’s research question focuses on buildings and sites designed to elicit contemplation: They theorize that the presence of “contemplative architecture” in one’s environment may over time produce the same health benefits as traditional “internally-induced” meditation, except with much less effort by the individual.

Contemplative architecture contains a series of design elements that have historically been employed in religious settings: Bermudez noted that it is “logical to expect societies not only to notice [the link between built beauty and experience] over time, but to exploit it as much as possible in their places for holy purposes.” These elements may be used in any place intended for contemplation or discovery, whether of a spiritual, personal, or even scientific nature. Architectural Digest wrote of the “modernist beacon” The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California:

The nonprofit research center … interweaves private and public spaces with a strikingly formal, inward-looking plan that echoes the format of a medieval cloister. Composed of strong-willed yet sensuous materials—travertine and reinforced concrete—it possesses a hushed dignity that encourages contemplation.

Two six-story laboratory buildings form the north and south boundaries of the complex. Each shelters an inner row of angular semidetached office structures that face each other across a travertine courtyard. Bisecting it all is a channel of water that seems to pour into the Pacific below. The buildings, fashioned of concrete accented with teak, focus one’s gaze on the horizon so “you are one with the ocean,” observes admirer Jim Olson, a partner in the Seattle firm Olson Kundig Architects.

By showing 12 architects photos of contemplative and non-contemplative buildings from facade to interior, the researchers were able to observe the brain activity that occurred as subjects "imagined they were transported to the places being shown."

All of the architects were white, right-handed men with no prior meditative training, creating the necessary (if comical) uniformity for neuroscientific research—the team wanted to ensure that the brain scans would not be influenced by factors unrelated to the photos, like gender, race, or handedness. For instance, the brain scans of left- and right-handed people often look different even when subjects are performing the same task.

In addition to posing an interesting control on the experiment, the decision to use architects was a strategic one meant to increase the researchers’ chances of achieving conclusive results. Though everyone encounters architecture, studies on the built environment struggle for funding because, as Bermudez remarked with a sigh, “it’s difficult to suggest that people are dying from it.” Architects were a natural choice for the pilot study because, the team reasoned, their critical training and experience would make them sensitive to features of the buildings that a lay person might overlook.

He conceded that the team "totally loaded the deck" by examining a horde of architects as they perused photos of the "most beautiful buildings mankind has ever produced.” Among others, the sites in the “contemplative” experimental group include La Alhambra, the Pantheon, the Chartres Cathedral, the Salk Institute, and the Chapel of Ronchamp. In response to a critic at the presentation he gave at the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) shortly after the study's conclusion, Bermudez explained that the goal of the pilot study is to reveal something interesting that warrants additional funding for an extension of the experiment using the general population. “It may be a limitation of the system,” Bermudez added, “but it’s what everyone has to do.”