Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Young Architecture Connoisseurs

Changes afoot on university campuses make it likely that many new employees will have different responses to the design of the office buildings of prospective employers than their parents did when they were workplace newbies.

As Nick Saval reports in his September 10, 2015, article in the New York Times (“If You Build It, They Will Come . . . Won’t They”), “On campuses today, you will find neoclassical libraries cheek by jowl with glassy, postmodern student centers. From Rem Koolhaas’s aggressive cantilever for Milstein Hall at Cornell, with its concrete-­and-­glass horizontal slab jutting out from old brick, to Zaha Hadid’s razor-­sharp Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State, many college campuses have become places to see the most daring, up-to-date work of globe-trotting ‘starchitects.’”

EliAndEdytheBroadArtMuseumatMichiganStateUniversitybyZahaHadid.Top
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University byZaha Hadid

Students graduating from schools that have invested in high-style architectural wonders will, through their exposure to these fashionable buildings, have developed a different context for evaluating the appearance of the buildings where they might work than people without this experience. Depending on your opinion of Koolhaas’s, Hadid’s and other starchitects’ work, that means that the building design bar has been raised or lowered for the offices of organizations trying to hire new graduates.

In fields where there is a lot of competition for top graduates, architecture is particularly important as the silent conversations buildings have with people can influence professional decisions made. Physical environments are often trusted to more accurately convey values important to an organization than easy to draft and change mission, and similar, statements.

MilsteinHallatCornellUniversitybyRemKoolhaas
Milstein Hall at Cornell University by Rem Koolhaas

People entering the workforce are able to assess whether environments are supportive of the work they will do to the extent that they have done the sort of tasks that they will do professionally after graduation while still in school. New workers simply don’t have the knowledge required to functionally analyze a space, unless they have already worked at their post-graduation job – although they may try to do so based on movies and TV shows seen, parents’ offices visited, and similar bits of information at their disposal.

Designing buildings whose appearance aligns with the expectations of the new architecture connoisseurs entering the work force seems likely to make hiring the best of the best just a little bit easier.

Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.