On Frequency Bias and the Language of Architecture

“We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.”

Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness

It’s warm and the sun is shining over Oregon. Spring is here, and we all know what that means. Time to clean out the proverbial closets and flowerbeds and finally get around to that house/garage/yard project you’ve been putting off all winter. We’ve been in full spring cleaning mode here as well, which is conveniently also my excuse for neglecting the blog these past few weeks. Our first big project for the season – painting the kid’s room – commenced last weekend and carried on throughout this week in between a full schedule of work meetings.

In a neck-straining, hand-cramping four-day sprint of spackling, sanding, vacuuming, taping, priming, and painting, we transformed three of the four formerly neon aqua walls to a six-year old girl approved pink. The ceiling we painted a crowd-pleasing standard ceiling white. Tack on a couple days to air out, and we’ve managed to partially wrap the project in time for the aforementioned six-year old’s stay this weekend. That leaves just one wall, which will feature a space-themed wallpaper – just as soon as we get around to ordering it – as well as the trim and doors, which we plan to finish painting next week.

Keeping with the out with the old, in with the new spirit, we replaced our dishwasher this week, as our previous one rather irritably decided to stop working. We are planning to update the kitchen and replace all the appliances anyway, but this rather inconvenient death of our most used appliance (obviously not counting the coffee maker) has accelerated that timeline. On the upside, I’ve learned quite a bit about kitchen appliances, which brings me to what I want to talk about today – a little something psychologists call the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

Also known as frequency bias or frequency illusion, I’ve been experiencing it a lot lately, and I still get ridiculously excited every time it happens. For anyone unfamiliar with the term, it’s essentially when you learn a piece of information or are exposed to a new concept or word, and then you start to come across it everywhere. Really, it’s a form of cognitive bias (though perhaps less pernicious than some varieties) in which you learn something for the first time, and then, because it’s new and interesting your brain starts to unconsciously seek it out (selective attention). This creates a natural tendency for you to notice that thing more often, thereby creating the illusion that it’s occurring in greater frequency, that it’s suddenly everywhere (confirmation bias).

Thus, having recently become familiar with not only all the functionalities of a modern, high performing dish washing machine, but also with various makes and models – from price points attainable to aspirational – Nathan and I have become particularly enamored with the German manufacturer, Gaggenau, which definitely falls on the more aspirational end of the spectrum. I was not previously familiar with the brand, but a few days after concluding our dishwasher research, I came across a mention of it in an article about ranges from the design-focused digital publisher, Surface. And then later that day – in an ad in my freshly delivered Architectural Digest.

A few days after that, in a different Surface article (I subscribe to their daily Design Dispatch newsletter), I came across a reference to another recent discovery. This – a random giant smiley face fashioned out of trees in the middle of nowhere Oregon. I first came across it when Nathan and I were returning home from a trip to the coast. We were driving along a rural section of state highway when he pointed out what appeared to be a lopsided smiley face on a distant hillside.

I had actually noticed the face on our outgoing drive, but thinking that either my severe hunger pains or the bag of chocolate covered espresso beans I was inhaling were interfering with my vision, I kept quiet about it. But approaching from the west on the way back, I could see that the two dots and concave swipe of green inside a circular patch of yellow were unmistakably arranged in the form of a grinning face. Having both exclaimed appropriate levels of surprise and fascination at such an unusual sight, we continued on, and the face faded from memory.

Until a couple weeks later, I was going through emails with my morning coffee, and what should I see in my inbox but an image of that very same face, along with a brief description of its provenance. Apparently, it was created by a lumber company during a reforestation of the area in 2011. Larch trees, which turn yellow in the fall, form the circular body of the face, while Douglas firs make up the green of the eyes and mouth. My happy wonderment at the existence of such a thing in the world was tempered slightly by the forthcoming knowledge that the trees will eventually be turned into lumber. As such this minor wonder of the PNW will only be around to view for the next 30 to 50 years.

I’ve also been experiencing a bit of the old Baader-Meinhof complex with a book that I’ve been reading for the past few weeks, The Architecture of Happiness, by contemporary philosopher Alain de Botton. It deals with several themes that I’ve been thinking about since writing a post on the Trump-era Executive Order 13967: “On Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” which has since been revoked by President Biden. The axed executive order would have made classical and other traditional architecture the preferred and default style for many federal buildings, due to their alleged superior beauty and embodiment of democratic ideals. In that post, I pointed out the dangers of conflating taste for a particular style – i.e. favoring traditional over modern architecture for its perceived greater beauty – with moral judgements – i.e. equating the ugliness of a modern building with undemocratic and immoral values. I made the case that these things are categorically different, and that a building may be condemned on aesthetic grounds but that it seems implausible to denounce it as a moral failure.

Reading The Architecture of Happiness, I’m beginning to wonder if I might be wrong about that. de Botton argues that to get away from the endless relativism that discussions of beauty engender, it is necessary to shift the argument from simply looking at buildings as visual objects divorced of any connections to concepts that we can analyze and evaluate, to understanding the language of buildings. Turns out they have quite a bit to say to us –

“Buildings speak – and on topics which can be readily discerned. They speak of democracy or aristocracy, openness or arrogance, welcome or threat, a sympathy for the future or a hankering for the past…

In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak visions of happiness.

To describe a building as beautiful therefore suggests more than a mere aesthetic fondness; it implies an attraction to the particular way of life this structure is promoting through its roof, door handles, window frames, staircase and furnishings. A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a good life.

Similarly, buildings will strike us as offensive not because they violate a private and mysterious visual preference but because they conflict with our understanding of the rightful sense of existence – which helps to explain the seriousness and viciousness with which disputes about fitting architecture tend to unfold.”

But if we can agree that buildings talk to us, why should we care about what they have to say? Again, it’s that shift from the subjective, “strictly visual” to that of a building’s embodied values that allow discussions about the appearance of architectural works to unfold in the same way that debates about ideas or politics might. de Botton puts it this way –

“Arguments about what is beautiful emerge as no easier to resolve, but then again no harder, than disputes about what is wise or right. We can learn to defend or attack a concept of beauty in the same way we might defend or attack a legal position or an ethical stance. We can understand, and publically explain, why we believe a building to be desirable or offensive on the basis of the things it talks to us about.

The notion of buildings that speak helps us to place at the very centre of our architectural conundrums the question of the values we want to live by – rather than merely of how we want things to look.”

A little under halfway through the book, and I’m still coming to understand the breadth of de Botton’s ideas and how I feel about them. But I can say at this point that it’s an excellent read, full of cogent remarks and whimsy observations that make my heart sing. Take for instance his characterization of different typefaces – made in service of his observation that people tend to see the human form in all sorts of objects – “The straight back and upright bearing of a Helvetican ‘f’ hint at a punctual, clean and optimistic protagonist, whereas his Poliphilus cousin, with a droopy head and soft features, strikes a sleepier, more sheepish and more pensive note.” Or his description of the various characters one might find in a kitchenwares shop – “Stemmed glasses seem generically feminine, though this category nonetheless encompasses warm-hearted matrons, nymphets and nervy blue-stockings, while the more masculine tumblers count among their number lumberjacks and stern civil servants.”

Quirky at times but always subtly authoritative, it’s a book about architecture and aesthetics – clearly two of my favorite topics – and an eloquently crafted ode to the importance of good design. If you have even a slight interest in just one of those things, and even if you don’t, I’d recommend reading it. And as a matter of fact, I have –

During our last big monthly team meeting at work, we were asked to share something that we’ve been watching, reading, or listening to. Following my colleagues’ lead, I offered up a couple recommendations, one that might be considered lowbrow and one a bit more cultivated. For the former, I unashamedly championed the Netflix fantasy series, The Witcher, and for the latter, you guessed it, The Architecture of Happiness.

To my happy surprise, several of my coworkers expressed knowledge and appreciation of de Botton’s work, with one sharing a link to a recent interview and another to an On Being podcast. Having never heard of de Botton until stumbling across The Architecture of Happiness, I couldn’t help but feel a little of the frequency illusion magic swirling around – even if it was artificially created by my bringing it up to a group of well-read, fellow copywriters. But then again, it wouldn’t be a cognitive bias if it resembled reality, now would it?