How to Read Buildings: A Crash Course in Architecture

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Another example of a seemingly near-universal principle has to do with the preference for symmetry. Generally, people prefer symmetrical faces on buildings, and this may be related to a biological predisposition to prefer symmetry in human faces or bodies (such symmetry is a somewhat valid indication of health). At first blush, it may not make much sense to think about preferences for faces or bodies as being a factor in architectural preference, yet some research in neuroscience suggests that we have an inbuilt tendency to ‘embody’ the objects that we see, even buildings. You’ve probably noticed, from time to time, that objects can appear to be face-like and that, once seen, the face in such an object is almost impossible to ignore. This phenomenon even has a name: pareidolia.

Buildings are embedded in cultures, histories and narratives, and a complete understanding of how a piece of architecture ‘works’ requires us to dig into those levels of meaning as well. Sometimes, one’s primal emotional response to a building and its layers of meaning can intersect. Consider a building like Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin. It is a sharply angled, zig-zagging monster of discomfort and foreboding. Yet, understood as a reflection of Jewish life in Berlin after the Holocaust, the building is a brilliant response to its surroundings and their history. As you walk around a building, try to notice how moving through the space affects you. In a way, you can think of this exercise as a graduation from the first one. But now that you are moving, there are many more opportunities to notice the effects of the design of a building on your body. Do you find yourself wanting to speed up or slow down? Does your posture change as you walk through different spaces? Do you notice anything special about where you want to stop and look around?

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Architects must learn to attune themselves to the way that a design influences their feelings. This can be a little bit like mindfulness meditation and can be practised with very simple objects – even something like a chair or a vase – before working up to things such as cathedrals or other architectural showpieces. Though a trainee architect takes years to learn how to do this, some practice with the basics will enrich your experience of architecture. Explore the functionality of a building. Look for clues that a building is fulfilling its functions well (or not), such as the amount of ease with which inhabitants seem to find their way through it. My own book Places of the Heart (2015) was written to bring to wider attention the fascinating relationships between the design of buildings and interior spaces, and our emotional lives. This handy book takes you on a guided tour of modern architecture through its most iconic and significant buildings, showing you how to read the hallmarks of each architectural style and how to recognise them in the buildings all around.

What was the building’s approval process like? All buildings need permission and, for larger buildings, the regulatory approval process can be lengthy and complex. Except for very controversial buildings, this can take quite a lot of digging to unearth, but fruitful sources are often the archives of local news media or, if you have a lot of patience and interest, even the minutes of local government meetings. ArchDaily. 2022. The Therme Vals / Peter Zumthor. [online] Available at: [Accessed 5 June 2022]. Which brings us to Adler’s final category: the “syntopical” reading of a book, where we read many works of a similar type or on the same subject and compare and contrast them. That process lies at the heart of scholarship, whether we’re reading books or buildings. Our region has several buildings of Pillsbury Hall’s ilk, like Minneapolis’s City Hall, which broke ground the year of Pillsbury’s completion, and Duluth’s old Central High School, finished three years after Pillsbury. Deploying an especially forceful version of Romanesque architecture popularized by the Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson, these massive, neo-medieval piles expressed the widespread, late-19th-century belief in the power of human organization and individual effort to achieve great things—like moving mountains of stone to construct such buildings. There are some features of buildings that elicit broadly shared responses from humans. For example, psychologists talk about the duality of ‘prospect and refuge’. The idea is that certain locations provide us with abundant sensory information (prospect) and make us feel safe and protected (refuge). Most people have a seemingly innate preference for locations in space that afford both good prospect and reasonable refuge. The 20th-century American architect Frank Lloyd Wright had an implicit understanding of the operation of prospect and refuge, and he used it to make residential spaces comforting by, for example, including cosy, low-ceilinged areas of refuge. The high premium on real estate with large windows and long views (ie, prospect) is also probably a consequence of these inclinations. These ideas have a long history, originating with the thoughts of early researchers of animal behaviour interested in how animals selected habitats. The overarching principle, it was argued, was to see and not be seen.

Tune in to how a building makes you feel and think. Sitting quietly, contemplate how your body feels in a built space. Note what sights, sounds and other sensations stand out to you, and consider how they are affecting your thoughts and feelings. Move through a building and observe how you react. See how different parts of a building draw you in or push you away. Note any effects of transitions, such as turning a corner or descending a staircase. D' Angelo, M., 2022. Neri Oxman Takes Her Interdisciplinary MoMA Exhibition Online. [online] Architect. Available at: [Accessed 5 June 2022]. urn:lcp:howtoreadbuildin0000crag:epub:a6af2ed8-1400-4c48-b98e-46ed6f24b17c Foldoutcount 0 Grant_report Arcadia #4281 Identifier howtoreadbuildin0000crag Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t34291p7q Invoice 2089 Isbn 9780713686722 How old is the building? Architecture is, of course, not static. Tastes change and so does the world. Transportation networks, the economy and lifestyles all evolve and, as they do so, architectural fashions adapt. It’s very common, for example, for two adjacent buildings to have been constructed in different eras and to embody different architectural styles. In the best cases, the later buildings will still relate stylistically to the earlier ones in some way. Exploring the temporal relationships between a building and its surroundings can provide fascinating insight.

What about sensations of touch? Even if you aren’t touching anything at the moment, you can have a sense of how something would feel if you were touching it (the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa calls this sense ‘the eyes of the skin’). Look at the textures of the walls and floors. Does it seem as though you are feeling them with your fingers? What does it ‘feel’ like? What can you hear? Spaces ‘speak’ to you mostly by the way that reflected sounds (of footsteps, for example) reverberate and echo. You might try closing your eyes for a few seconds to get a sense of this.Allow yourself to move through the space as your desires call to you. Allow yourself to be pushed and pulled by your surroundings. In the mid-20th century, a political movement led by the artist-philosopher Guy Debord advocated exactly this kind of practice, which was called a dérive, or ‘drift’. The legendary Swiss French architect Le Corbusier described what he called the ‘architectural promenade’, which is a similar idea for interiors. He suggested that interiors have itineraries, which are brought to life by our movements as we traverse a space. More generally, architects are preoccupied with transitions – those locations in a building where, as we walk, a surprising vista is suddenly unveiled. Think of the effect of descending a grand staircase or turning a corner to discover an unexpectedly large vault of space, which can cause changes of posture and movement with an attendant effect on our senses, a kind of awakening. With your observational toolkit tuned up, take your sensibilities on the road. You should be able to conduct the same kinds of procedures in any architectural space or, for that matter, as you behold any building’s exterior. What is your thinking like when you’re standing on the steps of a courthouse, gazing up at the details carved into its stone facade? How does your heart behave in an art gallery? What’s your mood like in an unfamiliar restaurant? As with your learner exercises in the home, try to tune in to the elements that speak to you. What are they saying? With time and practice, this kind of assessment of a built space can start to become automatic. Those responses have always been there. You are now just training yourself to be attuned to them. If you have taken the time to follow some of the instructions in this Guide, and especially if you’ve discussed some of your observations with others, you will have discovered one of the ground truths of architectural appreciation: in many ways, we are all different in how we respond to a space. You can also ask yourself: besides the actions of other inhabitants, what features of the spaces of your home contribute to your thoughts and feelings? Consider shape (including the shape of a particular room), patterns, colour, and form. For example, higher ceilings may promote abstract thinking, and people tend to find curvature attractive. You might even think about how you could change design elements within your home to shape it to your needs and desires.