| Architects are hopeless when it comes
to deciding whether the public will view their designs as marvels or
monstrosities, according to a study by Canadian psychologists. They say
designers should go back to school to learn about ordinary people's
tastes. Many buildings that appeal to architects get the thumbs down from the public. Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia decided to find out whether architects understand public preferences and simply disagree with them, or fail to understand the lay person's view. With his colleague Graham Brown, he asked 25 experienced architects to look at photos of 42 large buildings in the US, Canada, Europe and Hong Kong. The architects predicted how the public would rate the buildings on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 represented "terrible” and 10"excellent". A further 27 people who were not architects also scored the buildings out of 10. In addition, eight architects gave their own personal ratings of the buildings. The three groups tended to agree among themselves on a building's merits. And architects correctly predicted that lay people would on average rate buildings higher than they did themselves. But for individual buildings, the architects' perceptions of what the lay people would think were often way off the mark. "Some architects are quite good at predicting lay preferences, but others are not only poor at it, they get it backwards,” says Gilford. For instance, architects gave the Stockley Park Building B-3 offices in London a moderate rating of 5.2. They thought the public would like it much better, predicting a rating of 6.3. But the public actually disliked the offices, and gave it 4.7. Gifford thinks that lay people respond to specific features of buildings, such as durability and originality, and hopes to pin down what they are. "Architects in architecture school need to be taught how lay people think about buildings," Gifford concludes. He doesn't think designers should pander to the lowest common denominator, but suggests they should aspire towards buildings that appeal to the public and architects alike, such as the Bank of China building in Hong Kong. Marco Goldschmeid of the Richard Rogers Partnership, designers of the Millennium Dome in London, thinks the study is flawed. "The authors have assumed, wrongly, that buildings can be meaningfully judged from photographs rather than actual visits," he says. Goldschmeid thinks it would be more significant and interesting to look at the divergence of public taste between generations. |