
The brain avoids looking at glassy skyscrapers - rsj_hn
https://geneticsofdesign.com/2019/07/27/how-bostons-glassy-seaport-fails/
======
userbinator
_It turns out that the new glassy exteriors, whether boxy or round, are really
tough on the brain—difficult for it to take in._

I'd say it is the exact opposite: no one will focus on flat nearly-featureless
surfaces, because there is no fine detail to focus on. It's _easy_ to "take
in" at a glance, so the brain doesn't direct any more attention to it.

~~~
raducu
Also bland, badly-composed uninteresting picture -- it's all a noisy
background.

Just use google images search for glass skyscrapers an repeat the experiment.

------
TheRealSteel
The second image doesn't have anything else in the image to look at, whereas
the first has multiple buildings and plenty of sky space. This article is
bollocks. They've worked backwards from a conclusion to find (bad) evidence.

~~~
atoav
As somebody who dealt with photography and cameras his whole life and took
pictures as a professional for movies: this isn’t bollocks. The visual
readability of an opaque non-reflective cube is always going to be higher than
that of a mirror cube in a non studio environment.

This is because your brain needs to do more legwork to figure out the
underlying shape when you look at reflective suefaces that are mostly flat and
show you parts of a sky that you may or may not see at that point.

Reflectivity can also work in your favour, to highlight shapes, especially
when the paint additionally has a diffuse color (think of cars) and they are
in eye level (less confusing sky reflections), but highly reflective glass
buildings with nothing else to gisually hold on will most of the time just
reflect a random patch of the sky.

What visual readability _is_ , is the answer to the question how fast and
effortless a image can be read. A certain degree of unreadability may be
interesting even, but I am not sure if architects are that aware of the
reflective part of their buildings.

E.g. I happen to have the luck to have a second sun in the end of the day
despite my east-facing windows, because one of the glas buildings opposite. I
am sure they didn’t simulate that. I am also sure this increases the
temperature in the city.

Most architects I met just think glas looks rad and all their collegues use it
and so they do too.

~~~
aasasd
> _I am sure they didn’t simulate that_

They actually might, after arc-shaped reflective buildings started almost
literally melting cars that happened to be parked in the focus of the
reflected sunlight, and some constructs had to be built in the line of that
sunlight to protect the cars.

[https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/london-skyscraper-can-
me...](https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/london-skyscraper-can-melt-cars-
set-buildings-fire-8C11069092)

[https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-
london-23930675](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-23930675)

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2786723/London-
skys...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2786723/London-skyscraper-
Walkie-Talkie-melted-cars-reflecting-sunlight-fitted-shading.html)

~~~
anonoholic
Apparently not. The same architect had previously designed the Vdara Hotel in
Las Vegas, which suffered from the same problem. Apparently no lessons were
learned.

[https://www.businessinsider.com/the-vdara-death-ray-hotel-
is...](https://www.businessinsider.com/the-vdara-death-ray-hotel-is-still-
burning-people-in-las-vegas-2016-6?r=US&IR=T)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vdara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vdara)

------
gfaure
This seems ridiculous. Based on the output of an automated tool developed by
3M that produces a saliency map based on an image, I'm not sure how we can
conclude that people ignore skyscrapers.

~~~
praptak
I don't believe the article makes this claim. It's not about people actually
ignoring the skyscrapers, but rather the low-level layers of the brain tagging
them as not worth looking at. This sounds plausible - glassy skyscrapers look
a lot like the sky, which isn't very interesting to look at.

~~~
gfaure
No, this is wrong. In reality there's no link between the claim in the article
and the way that the human visual system processes its input. The article is
trying to make a leap between the output of some algorithm, and what the human
visual system does.

Meaningless.

~~~
praptak
I guess there is no disagreement. The evidence is indeed worthless.

Still the hypothesis is interesting and plausible. Maybe there is a way to
test it more rigorously, this time based on actual eye tracking.

------
DoreenMichele
This resonates with some of my experiences.

When I had a corporate job, I worked in a large glassy building that wasn't a
skyscraper. It was initially one story -- though tall for just one story
because it was industrial scale and held more than a thousand employees (about
two thousand, at least after the addition).

The one story building reflected the sea of blacktop parking lots around it
and appeared ominously black.

They added a two-story addition to one end and moved my department there. It
became clearer that the building appeared to be ominously black because of
what it reflected. The taller part reflected the sky while its base still
seemed ominously black.

It became even clearer that this was so when they built a three-story building
next door to house the IT department. That building mostly looked like
floating clouds and blue sky. Very little of it seemed visually heavy and
ominously dark.

But they were equally hard to mentally process. It was hard to comprehend
these buildings whose appearance morphed based on what was being reflected. It
was hard to figure out where they began and ended, what they were made of,
etc.

It was not only disorienting, it was disturbing. It was a bit like working in
a fun house mirror.

------
numlock86
> It’s equally instructive to see how the older parts of the Seaport (above)
> original 19th-C commercial buildings on Seaport Boulevard, for instance, fit
> well within the city.

Cherry picking. The sample images are misleading at best. First one is mainly
three buildings with quite some space around like sky and ground, even more
buildings in the back. Second one is basically only the facade of one
building. Sure there is a car, a bit of street and even some sky. But really
there is not much else to look at.

------
rb808
I love 4 WTC, for some reason its extra-mirrory, really tall with a flat roof,
from the street it often looks like it disappears.

[https://42floors.com/images/H596cc3895888f38019aee71d9a21247...](https://42floors.com/images/H596cc3895888f38019aee71d9a212479bdf344d9S1000x700W0seB505153O/0ca546855e4bfa8001033dcaf223b2e4a70c6d68)
[https://42floors.com/images/H2ace7a05db1517e4a6726532b38d4e6...](https://42floors.com/images/H2ace7a05db1517e4a6726532b38d4e65aec3ec1aS1000x700W0seB505153O/9eed7b2022eca55b6a4eca675aac7b4f29099cb7)
[https://42floors.com/images/Hc03b5fe9133b1ba7b10f11d22531e87...](https://42floors.com/images/Hc03b5fe9133b1ba7b10f11d22531e875b4702cf0S1000x700W0seB505153O/bb46f7a7a95d1ca70178bc178e148a9c4a3daff5)

~~~
mcv
I can't help but wonder how much of this is influenced by the lighting and
composition of the photo. Both your examples and those in the article.

I'm generally not a fan of the all-glass architecture, or even modern
architecture in general, and prefer buildings made of stone, and preferably on
a human scale, like 19th and early 20th century architecture. After the War,
buildings became featureless and soulless, and when architects started making
them look good from a distance or from the sky, and not up close. Designed to
look good as a model but not something for real people to live in.

Recent years have fortunately seen a return to more sensible architecture.

~~~
rb808
Yes definitely that second pic is probably not great. One thing I think it
does benefit from is being surrounded by other tall buildings, so often you
can only see it from very close up and its that view in the first photo that I
see nearly every day.

------
kolinko
Should we flag this post? The "science" presented in this article is so bad it
deserves being called fake news.

Like the commenters mentioned:

\- the photos are chosen in such a way that it's obvious eyes won't go looking
into the buildings

\- there is no mention of the sample size regarding participants and photos
that were shown. looks like cherrypicking

~~~
auslander
Flagging should be removed from HN, or at least give an option to un-flag. Its
a good interesting article.

You stated your opinion in your comment. Why do you need to flag the post?

------
ajuc
Isn't it simply brain looking at the edges of things? If a building doesn't
have edges inside it then we look at its silhouette.

~~~
rsj_hn
The author shows how for more classical buildings with more structure, the eye
focus on the structural aspects of the buildings.

~~~
creato
No, the author shows that some random computer vision tool focuses on more
structural aspects of the buildings. Assuming that is related at all to what
"the eye" does is ridiculous.

~~~
SiempreViernes
Assuming that a tool explicitly created to simulate visual human behaviour
would do exactly that doesn't seem very strange.

You can look at their validation study, it does ok:
[http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-
atte...](http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1006827O/3msm-visual-attention-
software-vas-validation-study.pdf)

------
burfog
They can reflect enough light to melt cars:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23944679](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23944679)

[https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2786723/London-
skys...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2786723/London-skyscraper-
Walkie-Talkie-melted-cars-reflecting-sunlight-fitted-shading.html)

[https://wonderfulengineering.com/skyscraper-literally-
melts-...](https://wonderfulengineering.com/skyscraper-literally-melts-a-car-
in-england/)

------
senozhatsky
I like glassy buildings. Can stare at them for minutes; the article makes
little sense to me. E.g. Hong Kong Harbour skyline, which is quite "glassy".
Many people travel to take a look at it.

[1]
[https://www.tripsavvy.com/thmb/SPLQhcPHF_u06LNEFd1qIc4p_3Q=/...](https://www.tripsavvy.com/thmb/SPLQhcPHF_u06LNEFd1qIc4p_3Q=/950x0/filters:no_upscale\(\):max_bytes\(150000\):strip_icc\(\)/GettyImages-586892388-5c7b646fc9e77c0001d19d3b.jpg)

~~~
flexie
This image shows the opposite of a glassy skyline. The only true glass
building, which reflects sky and water, is the one just above the boat. The
rest of the buildings are more traditional sky scrapers with mixed cladding.

~~~
senozhatsky
Maybe. But I can count something like 6 or 7 buildings on that pic which look
glassy to me. I'd say there are several glassy (which reflect sky and water)
buildings there [1][2].

[1] [https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-7263112-panning-
time...](https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-7263112-panning-timelapse-
video-victoria-harbour-hong-kong)

[2] [https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-27791884-victoria-
ha...](https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-27791884-victoria-harbor-hong-
kong-14-june-2017)

Edit: added more links.

------
a_e_k
Just for fun, here's how some of OpenCV's feature detectors handle the first
image:

AKAZE: [https://imgur.com/EvcStcH](https://imgur.com/EvcStcH)

ORB: [https://imgur.com/YHSEDD7](https://imgur.com/YHSEDD7)

I certainly wouldn't make any claims about what this says about the human
visual system, but at least for these two algorithms they do seem to have
troubles finding interesting key points to track on the buildings.

------
annsussman
I'm the author of this article. These are good questions and comments;
evolution's preset the way we take in surroundings and brain can't 'fixate' or
focus on glassy facades; eye-tracking studies and emulation software used in
article, show this. You can read more studies showing this here:
[https://geneticsofdesign.com/2019/07/07/why-eye-track-
boston...](https://geneticsofdesign.com/2019/07/07/why-eye-track-boston-city-
hall-to-see-evolution-at-work/) And here: [https://commonedge.org/game-
changing-eye-tracking-studies-re...](https://commonedge.org/game-changing-eye-
tracking-studies-reveal-how-we-actually-see-architecture/)

And if you're curious about why modern architecture is 'avoidant' here:
[https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-
mod...](https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-modern-
architecture/)

LMK if you have questions; always open to discussing.

------
reggie44
The article keeps using the word 'ignore'. The brain is not ignoring the
buildings, its just looking at them more subliminally.

~~~
SiempreViernes
No, the claim is explicitly that the fast visual processing parts of the brain
(the subliminal processing) decides the eye should focus on something other
than the buildings. That's quite clearly within the reasonable interpretation
of "ignore".

------
csomar
Playing Devil's advocate: The glassy skyscrapers are a good design because you
ignore them. So it's like they don't exist.

On a more serious note, this is kinda of an isolated part of Boston city. It's
a port that requires crossing the bridge. The bigger problem is that they are
building huge buildings with no connection to the subway/metro network.

~~~
sulam
Silver line goes there, but I’m not sure how useful that is.

------
draugadrotten
Somehow there seems to be an application for military use here. Make a shiny
tank and the enemy just won't be able to see it. Or does the shiny magic only
work on civilian buildings?

~~~
hydrox24
Dazzle camouflage[0] was used extensively in WWI to make it difficult to see
ships because they were so brightly coloured. It's not quite the same
principle, but it comes close.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage)

~~~
jrockway
The ships were easy to see. What was hard is determining what side you were
looking at and what direction they were moving. This made it more difficult to
engage them.

~~~
hydrox24
Sorry, sloppy phrasing about an often confused topic on my part. You're quite
right.

------
acchow
In the first photo, it seems more like the glass facade camouflages with the
sky which gives an illusion of more nature and less artificial construction.

~~~
SiempreViernes
There's not much nature there, it's just empty sky. For simple comparison of
what gives a stronger nature experience, just go out into a field and compare
looking straight up to looking out across the field

------
EGreg
I agree that, in general for everyday stuff, I prefer "down to earth" stuff
like the gritty NYC in the 80s or SF of today, than glitzy skyscrapers. They
seem too sterile.

BUT in those photos, man, there are so many confounding variables. How about
the fact that the sky is brighter than the skyscrapers, so you could be
looking for where it is brighter? Secondly, there isn't much detail or
variation on those "boxes", so your brain doesn't find that patch very
interesting. And so on.

There are plenty of skyscrapers people notice right away, e.g. the empire
state building, the space needle, etc.

------
nabla9
Perfect design for Evilcorp hq.

------
patrickfatrick
Seems like the first image is just looking for the areas of highest contrast,
ie the completely overexposed areas of clouds against the darker building.
Meanwhile the second photo lacks any areas of significant contrast. Bleh.

------
Havoc
Feels like the wrong conclusion in submission title to me. Glass buildings are
by their nature quite uniform & featureless.

...of course the brain looks elsewhere.

And I don't think it's a given that it's a bad thing either. If you think
about an ocean - people tend to look at the horizon not stare at the fairly
uniform ocean surface. Nothing wrong with the ocean surface though

