PAIN AND ARCHITECTURE

The scientific study of pain is evolving to a great degree;  they can now quantify it.  This has import for architecture.  While this may sound crazy, let’s look at the link between pain and architecture.

Since the beginning of time, we have not been able to objectively quantify pain.  Human pain was a subjective matter.  If something in your body hurt, you were powerless to say how much.  It could not be measured.  After all, we have differing pain thresholds.  What is painful for some is not painful for others.  And then, even when something hurts, there was always the question, how much?  As in, is the pain in your head, or do you really, really hurt?  And if you really do, is it as bad as you say it is?  So pain, to use the vernacular, is subjective.  Until now.

Yet as recently reported in The New Yorker, scientists are now developing the capacity to objectively quantify pain as an impact on the human.  By visually isolating various areas of the brain with fMRI scans, they are able to develop, for example, biological benchmarks for agony.  In fact, scientists agree that there is one small area of the brain that is consistently active when the subject is in pain.  This is a significant development.  For they are on the threshold of being able to establish objective, quantifiable, and calculable data for human pain.  Pain will no longer be subjective.  It will be measurable, just like blood pressure and the temperature of the human can be measured.  In fact, pain is on the threshold of becoming one of the vital signs.

If pain can now be quantified, I say, so can architecture.  We called for Quantifiable Architecture two pages ago.  In fact, it was only after reading the referenced article, which was then interjected into a family discussion, that Quantifiable Architecture came into focus.

To pursue this parallel a bit more, pain is equivalent to architecture.  That is to say, we have no metrics which objectively quantify the quality of a space or a built enclosure.  Like pain, our understanding of the effects of the quality of the space that surrounds us is purely subjective.  Like pain, we may say that the space is really nice.  Or we may say that the space is really not nice at all.  Or we might say, as we do with pain, on a scale of 1 to 10, this space rates, maybe, a 6.  And these sorts of subjective comments are all we have to evaluate.  One person’s space quality threshold is different than others.  So architecture, like pain, could never really be studied in any sort of objective manner.

Pain is neurologically complex.  Architecture is neurologically complex.  What pain is, and how it effects the human, is amazingly complex.  Architecture, and how it effects the human, is also amazingly complex.  If they can establish quanta for pain, they can establish quanta for architecture.  If pain can be rendered no longer subjective, then architecture can also be rendered objectively.  If pain can no longer rely on self reporting, then architecture can be free of self reporting.

And I believe the impetus to objectify pain should be equal to the impetus to objectify architecture.  As an architect, I am simply amazed by the poor quality of spaces that most of humanity inhabits.  Their houses are dark.  Their houses and offices have no, or very little, connection to the landscape.  People spend time in windowless basement family rooms, and think nothing of it.  There is a medical clinic that I go to once a year for a checkup, and all of the patient spaces are absolutely windowless.  I find that I can barely breathe.  And while that is bad enough for a patient who might spend 30 minutes in the building, what is the effect on the people who work there at least 8 hours a day?  Those poor people.  Yet we have no objective criteria with which to measure the physiological effects of these spaces.  At this point in time, all we have is incredibly vague language to describe the spaces:  closed in, institutional, dull, etc.

So to bring this full circle, until now, all we had were incredibly vague language, or a scale of 1 to 10,  to use to try to objectify pain:  it hurts a lot, I can barely stand the pain, etc.  So if science can objectify this hugely important human metric, then they can also apply their talents to the objectification of architecture on humans.

1.  Twilley, Nicola. “Seeing Pain.” The New Yorker July 2, 2018. Print. P 19.

The drawing above, if by chance you did not see it already, is a form dimensionalization of the word pain.  I first looked for scientific graphs using the word pain as input, and what came back was not too interesting.  So my drawing is somewhere between graffiti and a rationalized space enclosure.

And the drawing directly above is a Drawing From Drawing.  If you somehow think that the drawing at the top of the page could not be resolved into a holistic form, then this reduction, if you will, suggests that, indeed, the word Pain can transmutate into a building.