Environmental Psychology Quotes

We make our buildings, and then our buildings make and shape us.

We shape a building and thereafter the building shapes us.

Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.

Increasingly the evidence suggests that people benefit so much from contact with nature that land conservation can now be viewed as a public health strategy.

As the young spend less of their lives in natural surroundings, their senses narrow, physiologically and psychologically and this reduces the richness of human experience we need contact with nature.

Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?

I'm affected by my environment. Los Angeles makes me defensive and wary.

You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.

The great challenge for the garden designer is not to make the garden look natural, but to make the garden so that the people in it will feel natural.

Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.

I don’t know, I don’t feel right unless I’ve got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.

Time spent in nature decreases stress and anxiety and improves focus for adults as well as children.

Ugliness, squalor are breeding grounds for revolution. Beauty is conducive to tranquillity, happiness. Beautifying of homes and places of worship began with the dawn of civilization. Beautifying of workplaces is only in its infancy. Yet, since men normally spend more than half of their waking hours at work, surely it is important that adequate attention be devoted to elevating their working environment, whether office or factory, foundry or machine shop, mine or warehouse. Beautiful surroundings subtly encourage beautiful living. Drab surroundings, bad air, bad light, evoke bad reactions.

Let's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others.

I'm always really interested in different environments and how they affect people's lives and what it would be like to live somewhere else.

Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space ... On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also about pleasure.

I've always been a big believer in the power of place. I believe that where we are affects who we are when it comes to happiness, spirituality, economics and creative genius.

Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.

She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.

As many an architect will tell you, human behavior changes according to the environment.

When I worked in those offices, it was just irritating to me that somebody sat there and designed this place, never thinking that you would walk from here to there, and they didn't care. The one guy designs it, gives it to the other guy, he looks at it; no one thinks about all the people that gotta walk through it. So I think the best way to show those banal moments is to be just flat and wide.

Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, large ones weaken it.

There's something about driving through Texas, and it's hot, your skin is sticking to you. The environment affects your attitude and your swagger.

A widening circle of researchers believes that the loss of natural habitat, or the disconnection from nature even when it is available, has enormous implications for human health and child development. They say the quality of exposure to nature affects our health at an almost cellular level.

I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.