In 2023, the book "Psychology in Architecture" by Dr. Vytautas Petrusonis, an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture of Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VILNIUS TECH), was released (publisher: Vilnius Gediminas Technical University). We talk to the author about psychology in architecture and the growing importance of emotions in society.

– In a popular and scientific literature of the 21st century, there is a lot of talk about emotions such as how a person feels in a certain environment, the connection they make with it, and many other related topics. Why have these questions in recent decades become so important in a scientific and social fields?

– I believe that there’s too much attention focused on emotions. Overrating spontaneous short-term reactions is a symptom of a kind of "hysteria" in our civilization. We live in a time when cultural education is devoid of previous psycho-regulatory techniques, especially those manifested in religious culture, which used to encourage personal efforts to achieve spiritual peace. Hysterical reactions are dictated by upbringing, personal lifestyle choices, specific psychological traits. Moreover, the increase in social hysteria is also influenced by, as some research show, a significant portion of men having reduced levels of testosterone in their bodies due to nutritional and educational deficiencies. Therefore, their moods fluctuate, emotional reactions sharpen, there is a lack of motivation to act, the circle of interests narrows, cognitive functions slow down, and creative thinking skills weaken. Thus, we face a threat of social passivity and clamorous egocentric expressions in art.

– If there’s too much attention focused on emotions, should we rely on them less in a creative process?

– Emotions are gateways through which we communicate with the world. Currently, the often-mentioned emotional intelligence highlights the significant role of emotions in understanding the world as well as people. It is generally stated that it helps recognize one's own emotions and understand the emotions of others. But, I think its greater importance lies in creativity, not just in an artistic sense, but in any field, one of them being the creation of interpersonal relationships. Developed emotional intelligence, whilst helping to perceive the world, uses tools different from the language "spoiled by logic" (as Martin Heidegger meant it), which hinders creative thinking, immersing it in the quagmire of analysing faceless elements. It instead works with personally acquired images.

Images activate the right hemisphere of the brain, connect problem-solving with personal existential experience, helping automatically "read" the situation, aesthetically understand it, and intuitively find a solution to either a vital problem or creative task associated with that situation. In other words, not to calculate, but to intuitively grasp the vital mystery. It is no coincidence that in the older days life was understood as a riddle – if you solve it, you get to live it. This constructive, far removed from hysteria, way of how emotional intelligence deals with emotions is what I call cultural-ecological competency.

– Does this mean that without developed emotional intelligence, an architect is incapable to create for people?

– Architecture is essentially a social matter because, in rare cases, a person creates an environment for themselves or adapts it to a greater or lesser extent. Therefore, there inevitably must be a compromise. An architect is able to "tame" those emotions and, based on his skills and competencies, express them in his work as a certain artistic program acceptable to the majority. I want to make a clear distinction between the notions of competence (qualification) and competency. Competence is what you do (your skills) and competency is how well you do it. Competency is related with creativity, curiousity to think about where else that skill could be used, or consider whether that skill could become obsolete. Competency differs from competence by origin. Competency is acquired personally through creative suffering on the base of got knowledge in process of trial and error, while competences are learnt from teachers. In the educational process, it is essential to encourage the development of skills to grasp paradoxes, ability to solve riddles instead of using templates and memorising formulas. This is the condition for the formation of a creative personality's cultural-ecological competency.

When encountering problematic architecture, I am more interested in the collective psychology than in an individual one, where spontaneous emotional reactions are mostly externally demonstrated to others. It is the realm of collective psychology where "subtle" mental constructs of longer duration reside such as cultural ideas, cultural archetypes, and symbols. Let's consider a creative architect as one who can solve a specific design problem empathically and biophilically. Also innovatively. A true architect is one who can harmonize the relation between humans and environment.

– What emotional and psychological impact does architecture have on people?

– Emotional reactions are quite unstable. They are an impulsive response to direct experiences of environmental phenomena and situations. Architecture rarely causes such reactions. Encouraging emotions is not the goal of architecture, and it does not determine the meaning of architectural work. Architectural environments are quite heterogeneous, and in the fragment of a typical urban environment, it is various building styles, advertisements, transport, crowds that catch your eye, so it becomes challenging to identify an "architectural component” in it. The totality of emotional perception is always more powerful than the detail.

A person's reaction to the appearance of a building is influenced by understanding. Understanding consists of different ways of interpretation. The perception of the environment is influenced by the world model embedded in the perceiver's consciousness. It can be biophilic or necrophilic. In the first case, the environment is understood as alive, with which a dialogue can be initiated. In the second case, the environment is perceived egocentrically: "it is not alive, and it is us that can give it life (there will be what we create)." Erich Fromm wrote about the necrophilic character in psychology, using the analysis of Adolf Hitler's personality to support it. All authoritarian figures have similar traits. A person's reaction to an architectural object depends not only on the object's properties but also on the subject's level of awareness, his cultural background, and experience. A person is a being prossessing a certain "cultural code."

Unlike other arts, architecture is perceived not episodically and selectively but daily. The impact of architecture is continuous, so the threshold of its emotional impact should be lower than in music, literature, or cinema. Architecture is capable, more than other arts, of performing an essential function for cultural development – neutralizing human passions, ensuring tranquillity and spiritual balance. With its stable rhythm and ornamental structure, architecture historically promoted a sense of order and harmony. Geometric regularity proclaims eternal cultural truths, opposing momentary experiences. In architecture, the psychological moment is more related not to emotions but to certain senses such as security, comfort, spiritual peace, stability. Architecture neutralises the extremes of human experiences and reveals their meaning, while expressiveness and dynamism can enhance the conflict of an already complex and conflicting world.

– As a researcher, you have conducted many studies related to identity, and in 2023, you presented a book on the subject of psychology in architecture. Do these fields share common contemporary problems, or perhaps the field of psychology provided answers to identity related questions?

– When I said that I teach psychology to architects, some were surprised – how are these related? Everything happens in the mind – observation of the environment, perception, evaluation, interpretation – all of this is related to mental processes. Perception, feeling, and experience of identity – cultural or regional – depend on psychological assumptions. The most crucial thing is the world model formed in a person's consciousness. If the world model presupposes contact with the environment based on empathy, then everything is fine. My interest in psychology came as a way to continue the research on the cultural identity of a place. Often, at conferences, I would get a suggestion: "Let's ask people what kind of old town they want to see!" Then I would reply: "How can you ask the people who have already died but are the ones who created this environment? Or those who haven’t been born yet but will live in this place?”

The current environment is a story that voices the need of past generations. Architectural social aspect lies precisely in this narrative. It is crucial to listen to it, to decipher the "code" of the environment, which, in order to ensure a sense of unity across different generations, needs to be transmitted into the future. This communication with the environment occurs in a mode of a dialogue with specific subjectivity. I wrote about the conditions for the dialogue between the local community and genius loci (spirit of the place) in the article "Conditions for a dialogue of local community and genius loci" (2018). The original technology for determining and nurturing the cultural identity of the environment was presented in my dissertation “Respectation of the Locus’ Cultural Identity in Architectural Design”  (2005) and in numerous other articles. I would like to emphasise that asking current residents about the future of the place is not a good approach as the majority of them are not originally locals and not many care about the history of the environment they live in.

However, simplifying matters (asking people) is more fashionable and cost-effective because it doesn't require allocating funds for researching factors determining the uniqueness of specific locations. This means that attention is not paid to a deeper understanding of cultural identity and explaining the historical ideas that influence the inheritance of identity. These ideas can only be understood when environmental perception occurs in the category of collective psychology rather than an individual one. These ideas serve as a common denominator, embodied in the concepts of the worldview shared by past, present, and future generations.

– From a psychological perspective, what are the necessary conditions for creating "good" architecture?

There is plenty of literature providing psychological knowledge, advice suitable for all types of environmental design. However, only by engaging with collective psychology do we get into the realm of culture. Thus, delving into thinking through the network of categories of collective psychology helps to better understand important social and cultural factors responsible for the preservation of historical environments and the creation of new architecture.

I trust a creative, empathetic, competent architect. However, in order to be able to design, architect’s cultural-ecological competency must be assessed—it is important to make sure that he is considerate of the autopoietic properties of the environment. I wrote an article "Ability of architects to see autopoietic environmental features" (2021) in which I used Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's autopoiesis theory to support my arguments. I once again emphasise the questions of the interaction of subjectivities, dialogue with the environment, and the architect's ability to perceive the cultural determinations of the identity of a place.

One of the most prominent architects of the 20th century, Louis Kahn, used the principle of dialogue in his creative process. In his reflections, he evaluated the interests of architectural elements, for example, "bricks asked me for an arch," "a building is a community of spaces," "a street wants to be a corridor." This empathy-based approach allows, when making creative decisions, to activate a mode of poetic and symbolic thinking, which is crucial for the creation of architecture that conveys meaningful cultural expressions. This view stands in contrast to the objectivist (I would say necrophilic) orientation of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand considered Immanuel Kant to be the culprit of all the problems of modern civilization. She advocated absolute individualism, stating that people create themselves, which should be done in isolation, away from culture and even the loved ones. Unfortunately, quite a few young architects read her, indicating that they are still tangled in the pitfalls of egocentric individual psychology.

– Is your book more applicable in obtaining psychological knowledge for object design, or could it be used as psychological assistance for the architects themselves?

My intention was to help the architect develop personal cultural-ecological competency, to teach them to look at the environment responsibly (biophilically, with empathy). I occasionally talke about ways to solve personal psychological problems during lectures, but that is not in the book. I speak about ways to activate creativity through meditation. By the way, meditation was cultivated in the interwar period at the Bauhaus design school in Germany and the Vkhutemas school of art and technology in Moscow (around 1920).

– In your opinion, what changes in architecture can we expect in the coming decades, considering that human psychology and environmental perception are constantly growing in importance?

Having familiarised myself with numerous sources, I noticed that in terms of subjective interaction with the creation of the living environment, the past surpasses today’s attempts. Furthermore, we are wasting the knowledge of environmental creation that has been accumulated for over millennia. No need to be looking too far into the future. It is important to have culturally-ecologically competent architects who think independently but are capable to creatively recycle old knowledge in the face of newly emerging global technological possibilities. This would guarantee that future architecture will truly benefit the people.

The interview was conducted by Agne Vete, Vice-Dean of Communication, Infrastructure, Alumni, and Partnerships at the Faculty of Architecture.