The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - March 02, 2025


Brutalist versus Biophilic Architecture (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_797)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Adrian Brody Laszlo Todt Guy Pearce Richard Dawkins E.O. Wilson Van Buren
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Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

133.39

Word count

1,104

Sentence count

57


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Scott Saad reviews the new film, "The Brutalist" starring Adrian Brody and Guy Pearce, and compares it to evolutionary architecture and biophilic design. He also discusses evolutionary architecture in the animal kingdom and how it can be applied to human design.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi everybody this is Scott Saad. I just returned from watching the movie The
00:00:06.120 Brutalist starring Adrian Brody and Guy Pearce. I very much appreciate Adrian
00:00:14.200 Brody as an actor and Guy Pearce has historically been one of my favorite
00:00:18.120 actors, a part of which is because of his amazing performance in Priscilla
00:00:25.640 Queen of the Desert from many years ago. I would highly recommend you watch that
00:00:28.480 movie. Of course some of his political positions turn out to not be in line
00:00:36.940 with what I might consider to be appropriate but we need to separate
00:00:43.600 apparently the art from the political positions of the artists. So there you go.
00:00:50.280 So my quick thoughts on The Brutalist, it turns out to be a fictional story. I
00:00:56.420 actually went in thinking that it might be a biopic of, you know, the founder or
00:01:03.620 pioneer of Brutalism. For those of you who don't know, Brutalism is truly a brutal,
00:01:09.500 brutally ugly architecture. It's, you know, it's imagine the projects in various cities or,
00:01:22.960 you know, the buildings behind the Soviet Union prior to the
00:01:29.960 breaking down of the Soviet Union or all of the ugly concrete buildings that you might see. I mean,
00:01:40.520 there's a very famous case of it in Toronto, but there are many. My own home university, Concordia, has
00:01:49.320 a central building that would certainly belong to the Brutalist movement. Now I wanted to contrast this
00:01:57.960 because the Brutalist movement is actually the antithesis of
00:02:04.520 biophilic architecture and here's a perfect demonstration of a book that I got for you.
00:02:11.000 This is from my personal library. So biophilia is a term that was
00:02:16.360 introduced by E.O. Wilson, the late Harvard biologist, entomologist.
00:02:22.760 Biophilia refers to innate love of nature. And so evolutionary architecture, which uses
00:02:29.640 biophilic design, basically argues that there are certain
00:02:37.240 goals that we should seek to optimize when we are creating architectural designs that
00:02:43.560 invoke our love of nature. So for example, you know, having more sunlight and more windows,
00:02:50.760 possibly having greenery. When you have, for example, a living wall, you're incorporating
00:02:58.040 a green element and people like to interact with that, having possibly waterfalls. And so, and more
00:03:05.400 generally, there is something which I have written about in some of my previous works and some of my
00:03:12.360 earlier books, uh, prospect refuge theory. So for example, uh, there are certain types of landscape
00:03:19.800 designs that we are inherently and universally attracted to precisely because they confer
00:03:27.560 a ability to see wide, hence prospect while maintaining refuge be seen. I mean,
00:03:36.440 be able to see without being seen. And the argument is that that's a particular landscape
00:03:43.160 that allows us, for example, to avoid predators. And so I took those principles and have argued
00:03:49.240 that we can take prospect refuge, uh, principles and design shopping malls, retail stores, interior designs
00:03:59.400 that, that are congruent with prospect refuge metrics. I even did a very, very interesting set of
00:04:07.560 empirical studies with one of my doctoral students where we looked at, for example, where would people
00:04:14.600 choose to sit in a restaurant? And so there's all the different possible tables and seats where you
00:04:20.760 could sit and we can quantify how much each seat is congruent with prospect refuge theory or not.
00:04:29.160 And not surprisingly, we found that people end up choosing the seat that maximizes prospect refuge. And I'm,
00:04:36.520 I'm so frustrated that we've never yet published those, uh, that work in part because that particular
00:04:45.240 doctoral student, uh, has kind of gone off and, uh, haven't heard from him for a few years. I still
00:04:51.880 hold out hope that we might be able to both get his dissertation done and wrap up those projects.
00:04:58.840 Uh, now in, in, in the animal kingdom kingdom, of course, there are many animals that are architects.
00:05:04.200 In other words, evolutionary architecture is not only something that can be applied in the context of
00:05:12.840 human architecture, right? Uh, but animals themselves have evolved the ability to create
00:05:20.760 architectural designs that are, that maximize something of evolutionary relevance. So for example,
00:05:28.840 termite mounds, nest design, beaver designs, right? And so some of these things could be considered
00:05:37.400 extended phenotypes as Richard Dawkins explains in, I think it was his 1982 book. And so a phenotype is the
00:05:46.440 physical representation of an organism. The extended phenotype would be that there are things that happen
00:05:52.200 outside of the phenotype of the animal, but are still within the purview of evolutionary pressures that
00:05:59.400 create that extended phenotype. And so all this to say that, uh, if you contrast the brutalist movement to
00:06:09.480 the things that I'm talking about, evolutionary architecture and biophilic design and so on,
00:06:13.800 uh, in a sense, perhaps it took off precisely because it was a rejection of our innate human nature.
00:06:22.840 So there you have it folks. I hope that you've enjoyed, uh, in part my, uh, discussion of the movie
00:06:31.400 brutalist. Well, I guess I haven't really discussed it. If I were to give it a, uh, a rating, frankly,
00:06:37.320 I would only give it about a 6.5 number one, because it, it, I mean, it's okay for a movie to
00:06:42.520 be three and a half hours long, but I felt that it stayed too much on the dynamics between Van Buren,
00:06:49.320 the patron who ended up paying, uh, Laszlo Todt, who was the, the fictional character in the, in the movie.
00:06:57.640 Uh, and it's just the dynamic between them. And then the movie veered into weird, uh, tangents.
00:07:03.560 Uh, and so spoiler alert, if you don't want to hear this turn off now, at one point, the patron rapes
00:07:11.560 a drunk, uh, Laszlo in this, uh, marble mine in Italy, that was kind of strange. And so it took off
00:07:21.080 all sorts of weird, uh, into weird directions that I didn't really quite see how it added to the story.
00:07:28.680 So probably 6.5. Uh, but in any case, I mean, what I was most excited to talk about is the, uh,
00:07:35.880 the opposing of brutalism, which is, if anything is antibiophilic to actual biophilic design as
00:07:43.160 captured in this book right here. There you have it folks. Uh, if you like the work that I do at the
00:07:50.360 very least, please subscribe to the channel. It's free. If it's on YouTube, subscribe to the,
00:07:55.560 to the podcast. Again, those things really truly do help. And if you wish to receive some
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00:08:08.600 to my exclusive X content. Have a great day, everybody. Talk to you soon. Cheers.