Colin Ellard

Home, Witold Rybczynski

A History of Domestic Spaces

to the design of a building at an emotional level, and even though those feelings influence what we do when we are there, we most often don’t have the time or the inclination to dissect our daily responses to place to make sense of them.

I’m an experimental psychologist who studies the ways that buildings influence those who use them.

was too young to have any clear understanding of the gulf of time that separated us from the site’s creators, and my mind was uncluttered by the years of schooling and the accretion of complicated mental associations that when I was an adult would make it so much more difficult for me to be in the simple presence of a monument

My own belief is that the key to building better places at all scales is to begin by observing the intricate relationships between our lived experiences and the places that contain them—

we build to change perceptions, and to influence thoughts and feelings;

only do animals have a remarkable ability to seek out the best available locations for the necessities of life, but that they are able to anticipate how a setting will serve their future needs

We still speak of the dichotomy of “hearts and minds” in much of our everyday discourse,

But when those histories become an open book, available as inputs to providers of technology that can literally put shields before our eyes, then that history will trap us. Rather than becoming an endless source of refreshment and novelty, our worlds run the risk of becoming nothing more than a series of self-reinforcing feedback loops based on something a little bit like our browser history.