What are the patterns we are looking for in our building designs? And can babies help us discover them? Eleanor Young investigates
What do babies spend time looking at? Faces were long thought to be what would draw their attention most. But one research project has shown that babies spend more time looking at a picture of a building.
Anna Franklin of the Sussex Baby Lab has also shown that babies spend significantly more time looking at complex structures with arches and flourishes than similar, but plainer, images of buildings when they are shown the two together.
Listening to Franklin, watching her video of a baby’s slow eyes lingering, I wonder what this means. Are the babies puzzling out the details looking for signs of the imprint of faces; is the arch and window combination an eye?
If so, where is the nose? And the mouth? Are they hoping it will fall into place? Like the Face House in Kyoto, Japan, by Kazumasa Yamashita, or the rather less sophisticated, and less well known, Transformer House, in Koenigswinter, Germany. With the compound face-i-tecture making me smile a little, I started on a hunt for social media accounts devoted to sharing pictures of such friendly buildings.
Turns out two windows and the downturned mouth of an arched suburban porch – even with a perfectly placed snub nose of burglar alarm – don’t really cry out ‘face’ to me
It was a rather disappointing search, to be honest, and required a lot of squinting and imagination. I feel like I have seen more convincing faces in architecture when caught unawares around the city.
Turns out two windows and the downturned mouth of an arched suburban porch – even with a perfectly placed snub nose of burglar alarm – don’t really cry out ‘face’ to me, although eyelid sun canopies help. Though I did uncover the phrase ‘facial pareidolia’, which can also apply to seeing Jesus in a drainpipe in Coventry (true story, see the Coventry Telegraph – and Daily Mail – in 2010).
I am not sure where faces would fit into the hierarchy of Christopher Alexander’s 253 patterns, as laid out in his Pattern Language. The book goes deep behind and beyond the elevation of a building, evoking places to dwell, like the alcove or sunny counter. Alexander writes: ‘Many of the patterns here are archetypal – so deep, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seems likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in 500 years as they are today.’
So forget about my diversion into architecture and facial features – those babies are searching for archetypal features in buildings, a language of both safety and nurture; power and joy as Alexander would have put it. Now all we need is to set up an experiment to test that hypothesis.