GONG!
Taco Bell is not my go-to food joint while on The Row House Roadshow, but I do enjoy their 15 second commercials.1
One is particularly effective at warming my heart and making me squirm, not because it’s repulsive,2 but because it manages to confront me on an intimate level.
In the video above, you see two young women sitting on a bench:
Cutting your burrito? You’re such a Virgo.
To which the other girl volleys:
And you have serious Libra vibes.
…because her friend was indecisive about which burrito to eat first.
The Zodiac references are lost on me and most viewers, but the intimacy of their connection is unquestionable.
How does the director do this? Through their eyes.
That’s the discomforting bit.
The meeting of eyes can challenge our emotional insecurities or trigger shame, as when our dog Rue slinks off the forbidden chair and casts her adorable eyes to the floor.
The latest neuroscience only backs up what we’ve always known about the power of face-to-face intimacy.
What Have We Always Known?
Ask Becky Becker.
As a gifted woman, Mom, and post-partum doula, she’ll tell you about the power of eye contact for parent-child attachment.
It begins as soon as the cord is cut.
This is why attachment itself becomes difficult to establish for those who lacked it in their formative years.
With research coming-in-hot like cheese product over your Nachos Supreme, professional counseling is increasingly informed by the neurological power of bonding.
As an example, check out Sue Johnson’s3 work based on attachment theory.
Neuroscience is also getting mixed up with the field of architecture and design, yielding fascinating connections that back up a lot our hunches as to why some buildings make us feel happy while others…not so much.
Hello! I’m A Building.
We’ve all approached a building and thought (and maybe said, loudly)
“Whoa, that’s awesome!” as when you stand under the 632’ St. Louis Gateway Arch, gaping up at its impossible segments of stainless steel glistening in the sun.
Of course, we’ve also encountered monstrosities that draw out
“What were they thinking?” as when you encounter just about any post WWII state-funded office building or university dorm.
These reactions are conscious.
What the science is showing, though, is that most of our reactions to places are sub-conscious, triggering deep emotions.
On this year’s road show, I’ve been reading a stack of books on the built environment.
As part of my study, I geeked out over a book titled Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives On Improving The Public Realm.4
The punchline of this rather weighty collection of academic essays comes in the last chapter, and it startled me.
The set-up for the book’s conclusion comes through a series of chapters on the latest research into facial recognition as a key factor in determining how one feels about different types of physical settings.
For instance, eye tracking software suggests that “high quality environmental edge conditions help invite visitors and create highly desirable public spaces.”5
Some of those edge conditions include trees, pleasant sight lines, “cozy” streetscapes, and faux natural elements that mimic natural elements.
In Your Eyes
Our brains and bodies react to our encounters with architecture, either increasing our sense of happiness or triggering sub-conscious feelings of insecurity, coldness, and disorientation.
The foundational example in the book is born out in chapter 3: Bonding With Beauty: The Connection Between Facial Patterns, Design and Our Well Being.6
Researchers Donald Ruggles and John Boak demonstrate how the nine square pattern, derived from the parent’s face, usually a mother, is imprinted into the neural pathways of infants and later “returns again and again in our cultural artifacts.”
This pattern is what we intuitively consider beautiful and even releases the hormone endorphin.7
Now To The Punch Line
What if some of the unsettling buildings we encounter are reactions to severe trauma in the lives of their designers?
Walter Gropius, it turns out, was one such architect and founder of the Bauhaus8 movement that brought us “brutalism.” He lived from 1883-1969 and was a survivor of trench warfare in World War 1.
Neurotypical individuals need to see face-to-face facades with detail to most smoothly regulate and implicitly feel safe within themselves and their surroundings. Thus, the…disconnection so common to much modern urbanism, built in Gropius’s “modern” style, turns out to be not random at all, but a direct external expression of the internal dissociation and disembodiment common to trauma survivors like him."9
The buildings Gropius designed had to function as bunkers on the inside, away from the nerve gas and nightmarish shelling of modern life.
The Eye of The Storm
The Row House recently co-hosted a conference on the British group of writers known as The Inklings.
In listening to Matthew Dickerson’s talk on “Creativity, Art, Mortality, and the Fall In The Works Of J.R.R.Tolkien,” I was struck how a fellow WW1 survivor turned his trauma into a vast world of beauty, albeit with a backdrop of serious foreboding.
Another workshop presenter, Christie Purifoy, speaking of “Place Making in Narnia,” began her talk with an audio clip of the German blitz on London. It was harrowing.
C.S. Lewis drew on that fresh English memory to create luminous tales for children, still loved today by all ages, whose central figure is an untamed, yet very good lion, who overcomes evil.
For Lewis and Tolkien, it appears their gaze into “God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” rescued them from despair and from foisting mere ugliness upon us all.10
Maybe it all began with a mother’s smile.
I mute a LOT of commercials while watching my share of 76’er basketball games. But I usually give a listen to the Bell.
Speaking of repulsive, when I’m tempted to ingest the fine foods of Bella La Taco, I’m stopped short by an anecdote I heard about a past employee who was told certain items couldn’t be prepared because “the meat hose is down.” 🤢 I’ll stick to Chipotle, thank you very much.
Under the loose tutelage of Eric Jacobsen, author of several books on the “theology of place,” I’ve got a fine list of books that relate to how the built environment intersect with our spirituality. Jacobsens’ recent book is Three Pieces of Glass, a treatment of smart phones, TV’s, and windshields as mediums that affect our human experience. Other titles I’m working through are: Lewis Mumford, The City In History; Walter Bruueggemann, The Land; Chuck Mahron, Jr., Confessions of a Recovering Engineer; Lee Hardy, The Embrace of Buildings; Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design; and James & Deborah Fallows, Our Towns: A Ten Thousand Mile Journey Into The Heart of America
Hollander, Justin B. and Sussman, Ann, Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives On Improving The Public Realm (New York: Rutledge, 2021), page 78.
Hollander, and Sussman, Urban, page 40.
Ruggles ,Donald H and Boak, John in Hollander, and Sussman, Urban, page 49-54.
I read Tom Wolf’s From Bauhaus to Our House with explosive giddiness, but now I want to weep.
Hollander, and Sussman, Urban, page 217.
II Corinthians 4:6.