From architectural psychology to environmental psychology: behavior, to cognition, to participatory design

David Stea

This is the story of the birth, childhood, and stumbling adolescence of a new discipline, and of the slightly dysfunctional extended family that tried to raise the newborn entity. Not a standard research lecture, but rather a more humanistic account, it stresses major figures and events throughout the early colourful history of the new discipline, uniting known events with those lesser-known (including the social revolution of the 1960s, the expansion of architectural psychology into environmental psychology, and the transition from modernism to postmodernism in architecture), through the medium of stories.

This illustrated presentation begins with the presumed origins of architectural psychology in engineering psychology and other fields, from the 1940s through the 1960s, in Saskatchewan, Massachusetts, and the UK , starting with the people and the forces that generated architectural psychology in studies of mental hospitals and public housing. The discussion continues with the contribution of the cognitive approaches of the philosopher Kenneth Craik, the psychologist E. C. Tolman and the urban planner Kevin Lynch et al, to the evolution of participatory architecture.

As interdisciplinary activity has ebbed and flowed, environmental psychology has partially abandoned architecture (and vice-versa), but may be primed for a resurgence.