Inside/Outside: The Architecture of Connection

Too many spaces just don’t feel good. One reason may be that, in some way, usually subconsciously, they just don’t make sense to us. That “sense” is usually more subconscious than consciously known, which makes it harder to dissect, decode, and design for. Where am I in a building, for instance? What’s next to this space? Does the entire building come together in our minds with a common sense and easily understood arrangement? 

One test that takes the subconscious to the conscious level is describing to another person how to get around in a building. This quickly reveals spatial clarity or confusion. Much too often, buildings are confusing. That incoherence makes it hard to navigate. It also creates feelings of stress.

How can we understand and achieve low-stress design solutions before a space or building is designed or, with fewer options, after it’s finished? There are intuitive traditions, like feng shui, that can help make contributing factors accessible to conscious attention, to the design thinking of architects and interior designers. How do we help make a space feel “settled?” If feng shui is accurate, then mistakes can be avoided, coherence enhanced, and stress decreased.

Another approach has a cognitive framework. A core element in that realm is coherence – does the space make sense in perceptual terms? One factor that can make non-sense of an environment is visual disconnection from other spaces. That triggers disorientation. People feel more comfortable when they know where they are in the world. One solution is to open up views. That can be between interior spaces or between inside and outside spaces, including streets and other public spaces, and certainly toward nature.

Along with other architects, Frank Lloyd Wright solved a large part of the coherence problem by manipulating one of the most pervasive architectural elements: windows. Everybody knows buildings have them, but how can architects use them strategically to enhance coherence for the occupants? Windows aren’t only for making a handsome building exterior? 

Wright, particularly in his Prairie Houses, designed wide windows that could take in wide views, sometimes all the way to the horizon. He also employed translucent windows, both transoms and skylights, above the eye-level view windows, to connect occupants with the light from the world outside. That’s even more reinforcement of Inside/Outside connection. Wright could achieve a wonderful balance of comfortably feeling protected inside, while, in the same moment, being a part of the wider world beyond the room.

Why so much concern with windows? Perhaps it seems obvious and intuitive, but there’s more going on. It turns out that human survival over the eons depended on wide views for survival, and perhaps that built-in hard-wiring makes us feel particularly good when inside/outside connections are strong, including wide-view windows. The principle, as referenced in anthropology, is Refuge & Prospect, refuge for protection, and prospect for seeing what’s out there. Predators and prey were the main subjects of eons ago, but that orientation to the outside world still resonates in us today.

Another element of the outdoors was, and remains, things that grow, green things that are alive and, in many cases, are good to eat. Verdant environments, studied across cultures, rank very high in visual preference studies. Among the conjectures is that we prefer particular aspects of the world that have contributed in concrete ways to our long-ago ancestors’ survival, similarly to Refuge & Prospect. That attraction can be summed up in the framework of “biophilia,” a love of living things in nature. It translates and transfers to green elements embedded in the design of human-created objects, including architecture.

And then there’s the sky, the luminous dome that brings us sun and warmth, along with weather that sustains us, though it can also challenge and threaten us. Whatever the potential, we have a built-in need and corresponding built-in mechanisms to monitor what’s outside. Consider our discomfort when we can’t see the sky from a room, when we can barely see out, when we can’t see out at all.

Basement apartments without windows, while they maximize protection, minimize connection to the outside world. Just having the ceiling high enough above the ground outside to have a place for windows is a benefit much greater than just the dimensions of the windows. Lightwells with generous setbacks also add a much more comforting sense of connection.

Architecturally, connection can be “tuned” in other ways. Walls can be designed for different degrees of transparency, from opaque to completely clear. For example, the window in a house or apartment or office can be floor-to-ceiling, offering no gradient toward opacity at all. Or it can be designed, with some solid elements, for a softer connection, filtering both light and view.

These are design opportunities that have strong aesthetic consequences, but their underlying attraction is founded on forces far deeper than “prettiness” alone. They help define how we live and how well we understand the world we are living in. And, no small matter, they give architects a rich, wonderful zone for creative thinking.

Aspects of Inside/Outside are developed further in the Behavior & Architecture chapter of People-Centered Architecture, Driving Design, Practice, & Education.

Looking inward and outward, 

Milton