Visual Aggression in Architecture

Humans automatically scan all visible space with saccades — cyclically repeated rapid eye movements. The autonomy of saccades was discovered in 1987 by Vasily Filin, a Doctor of Biological Sciences. His experiments proved that the process is involuntary and does not depend on the presence of objects to look at.

The saccade pattern (a pattern of movement) depends primarily on the conditions of the visual environment. We cannot control saccadic eye movement; we are forced to "obey" the images we see.

This pattern reveals that many modern buildings and interiors become a health problem (we exclude outdoor advertising here — architects are not to blame for that).

At the Moscow Video Ecology Center, visual hazards are divided into two groups:

• Homogeneous visual fields — when there is practically nothing to look at because of a lack of visual detail.
• Aggressive visual fields — evenly distributed, identical visual elements.

Homogeneous fields are found on our streets and inside our homes. Because of smooth finishing materials and primitive architectural volumes, the straight contours and large, monotonous planes of structures give the eyes nothing to fix on after each successive saccade, while the amplitude of these forced eye movements increases sharply, causing discomfort and fatigue. Over time, a homogeneous environment causes disorders of the binocular apparatus, of accommodation, and of the on-off receptor system.

Aggressive visual fields are not uncommon either. They begin in the suburbs, with hundreds of identical windows on every facade, and reach frightening proportions in some modern buildings and small architectural forms. Almost everyone knows how unpleasant it is to look at the contrasting checks or polka dots on clothing fabric when several elements fall within the retina's area of clear vision. The effect here is the same. In addition, because of the uniformity of the parts, it is difficult for the brain to combine the left and right images that the eyes receive.

Today architecture serves an even more ruthless ideology — the ideology of the brand. Here everything works toward the exclusivity, originality, and irreplaceability of the brand. The city turns into a landscape of competing icebergs. Giant corporations want their headquarters to demonstrate their success and reliability. But what we get is detachment from the space, aggression toward the surroundings, opposition to it. The portfolios of design firms are full of original ideas for buildings that serve successful brands rather than society. The city ceases to be compositionally unified. And the people who live in it cease to be unified, too.

Both the visualizer and the photographers help promote any house project with beautiful surroundings and special effects. They use dramatic natural phenomena, Photoshopped sunrises, polarized reflections, special lighting, contrast, unnatural angles, and similar "spices" — just to make the project appealing.

A project that is beautiful in pictures is realized in life as a dusty mirror box reflecting the emptiness of the winter sky or, worse, the blurred outlines of nearby buildings, which saddens passersby and makes their eyes wince.

Sometimes brutal modern buildings do not look so bad surrounded by existing classic architecture, and can even be a highlight of the neighborhood. But what would these conceptual buildings look like if you changed the scenery around them and built entire cities out of them? Huge buildings without detail seem like artificially enlarged mock-ups, and humans seem like bugs. There is no flowery complexity; the space is dominated by the gray crampedness of cemetery-scale monuments.

An aggressive visual environment makes people aggressive, changing society for the worse. Won't we be held responsible for the lives of future city dwellers?