Eye-tracking Boston City Hall is fascinating and instructive not only because it shows us how ‘avoidant‘ the building is – how the brain directs the eyes not to look at the building in the first 3-to-5 seconds, before ‘conscious’ thinking can come online –  but also because it shows us how the ‘reality’ we ‘see’ is a construct, a representation made by the interaction of our eyes and ancient brain.

The research suggests that since our brain is this evolutionary relic from the pleistocene age, – it hasn’t changed in 35,000 years or more – certain architectural forms are always easier to look at and take in, including the bi-lateral symmetry, rounded forms and clear tripartite hierarchy of Boston’s old State House (below right) versus the harsh repetitive parallel lines and hard-to-find-front-door of City Hall (below left).

Essentially, the study indicates how forms that occur in nature are always easier on the brain, an artifact of nature, to look at and fixate on, than forms that do not naturally occur like rigidly repetitive, mechanically-generated, parallel lines. And this all makes sense, once you think about it! Boston City Hall stresses the brain, it’s not natural, so the brain, intent on promoting our survival, instantly directs us to stay away!

To learn more, read results from our first eye-tracking study of Boston City Hall here: Eye-Tracking Boston City Hall to Better Understand Human Perception and the Architectural Experience, published this month in the peer-reviewed New Design Ideas journal.

Also available below (press text):

An earlier version of this study appeared in Genetics of Design, last year, here.