La Villa Rotunda by architect Palladio is, arguably, one of the most significant buildings in architectural history. Designed in the late 16th-century as a country house in Vicenza, Italy for a retiring cleric, its captivating elevations would go on to provide the prototype for countless other buildings worldwide including The White House in the U.S.
But how do people actually look at the building? Here’s a gaze path video showing one person taking it in. When you click the arrow, the moving dots and lines reflect what drew the subject’s gaze when she looked at the picture using eye-tracking technology.
The yellow circles show fixations where the eyes stick to the image, and the lines show the saccades, the movement the eyes make—often with no ‘conscious’ control—as they dart from one part of a scene to another. Here’s a gaze path made by another person:
You can see how each participant looks at the world differently—and you can also see how the Villa provides our brain with plenty of eye candy to focus on.
But what do people really focus on?
In the spotlight image below, created by aggregating the gaze paths of 33 viewers, we see that—despite individual differences—people tend to focus on the same things; in this case, the center of the portico and all the statuary atop it. In spotlights, the image glows brightest where people look most, fading to darker grey and black where they look least. We see here how people are hardwired—with no conscious effort, irrespective of age or culture—to check out other people, even stone versions of themselves perched at the edge of rooftops.
And interestingly, the focus on the statuary seems to intensify when viewers look at a photoshopped version of The Rotunda – without windows. Note how the area around the statues appears to glow brighter. For a social species like us, blank walls are of no interest. Our brain, knowing us well, saves its energy for focusing on what we love most: ourselves.
One preliminary conclusion about architecture? Buildings that last feed needs we may not realize we have; in this case, the perennial one to be seen and reflected. Makes sense, of course, since as a social species designed for interrelating, architecture we’re going to instantly ‘attach to’ and have strong feelings about, has no choice but to trick the central nervous system into believing its seeing one of us.
all photos videos © AnnSussman
Interested in ‘seeing’ your brain subconsiously take in the buildings around you? Then come to 
Yes, we’ll demonstrate how your brain is not oriented to take in blank facades; indeed, how it barely lets you look at them and we’ll talk about why. (It’s not critical for survival the way areas of high contrast are.) We’ll observe the same phenomenon looking at a photo of the Dunker Church at the Antietam Battlefield at left below, and with windows removed, at right. This is a ‘shadow’ image, designed to distill where an aggregrate group of testers look most when given 15 seconds to take in a picture. Notice how they barely ‘fixate’ on the building at all once windows are out?
We’ll also talk about a recurring theme at geneticsofdesign.com, how important it is for people to see faces and how we do this – consciously and unconsciously – all the time. Check out the ‘shadow’ study below…showing how unconciously our brain will observe a face-like image in the carriage house within 15 seconds – whether we want to or not!
And just as importantly we’ll check out how our brain takes in ‘actual’ faces. Here’s a Picasso portrait of wife, ‘Marie-Therese’.
all photos copyright Ann Sussman
Also intent on maintaining its dominance, Amazon uses a version of the smile for its logo too, in its packaging tape (above right), exploiting the science that explains when we see a smile, we unconsciously feel happy. Part of us will feel good, and readily attach and reach out for that cardboard box even before we open it—even if it’s destined for someone else!
The Genetics of Design 