杏吧原创

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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 鈥渢errible鈥� and 10 鈥渆xcellent鈥�. 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鈥檚 merits. And
architects correctly predicted that lay people would on average rate buildings
higher than they did themselves. But for individual buildings, the architects鈥�
perceptions of what the lay people would think were often way off the mark.
鈥淪ome architects are quite good at predicting lay preferences, but others are
not only poor at it, they get it backwards,鈥� says Gifford.

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.

鈥淎rchitects in architecture school need to be taught how lay people think
about buildings,鈥� Gifford concludes. He doesn鈥檛 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. 鈥淭he authors have
assumed, wrongly, that buildings can be meaningfully judged from photographs
rather than actual visits,鈥� he says. Goldschmeid thinks it would be more
significant and interesting to look at the divergence of public taste between
generations. 鈥淭he Eiffel Tower was reviled by everyone at the time but was
allowed to go ahead as it was only meant to be up for a decade or so,鈥� he points
out.