Mark Berman

They have a lot of the curved edge structure that real nature has.

And it just feels like it's possible that it might be having some cognitive benefits to us.

And

I had an architecture student, Alex Coburn, contact me where he was interested in seeing if buildings, building facades or building interiors, if they mimic

patterns in nature, did they also yield some benefits?

So he and I and a few other people designed some studies where we had people look at different architectural facades.

These would be buildings for hospitals or religious buildings or government buildings.

And in those buildings, we also quantified how fractal the buildings were, how much curved edge structure the buildings had.

And basically what we found was that the buildings had more curved edge structure, had more fractalness.

People said they liked the buildings more and that they actually thought that the buildings were more natural than buildings that were sort of more rectilinear that had just straight lines.

And the same was also true of building interiors.

So just like not all nature is created equal, not all of the built environment is created equal.

And it does have me thinking or wondering whether even without actually using any real nature, if we designed the built environment with a lot of these natural patterns...

could that yield some of these cognitive benefits?

And the architect Christopher Alexander wrote many books about this, encouraging architects to try to mimic patterns of nature in their architecture, that that would lead to more vibrant buildings,

that would make people feel more connected to the environment, but might also induce some different psychological benefits.

And I do remember one time my colleague, Candice Vogler, who's a philosopher, she joked with me one time that the Durham Chapel at Duke is so beautiful that it does the praying for you.

And, you know, I kind of wonder, you know, is the architecture...

You know, at the University of Chicago, you know, so grand does it do the studying, you know, for you.

And, you know, and I remember being a student at the University of Michigan, and I would often try to study in the law library that had this really grand and intricate reading room versus studying in the undergraduate library that was called the ugly.