Decoding Modern Architecture

Abstract

The physical and affective bases of the differences between architects’ and laypersons’ aesthetic evaluations of building facades were examined. Fifty-nine objective features of 42 large modern office buildings were related to ratings of the buildings’ emotional impact and global aesthetic quality made by architects and laypersons. Both groups strongly based their global assessments on elicited pleasure (and not on elicited arousal), but the two groups based their emotional assessments on almost entirely different sets of objective building features, which may help to explain why the aesthetic evaluations of architects and lay persons are virtually unrelated.