What is Neuroarchitecture? Evidence, Methods, Misconceptions and the Research Behind the Term
- Archontia Manolakelli
- 1 day ago
- 14 min read
So, what happens when we walk into a space?
Not only what do we think of it, whether we like it, or whether it fits the brief. But what happens in the body before we have fully explained the experience to ourselves? What happens to attention, stress, orientation, comfort, memory, or emotion as we move through a room, a street, a hospital corridor, or a classroom?
This is the kind of question that sits behind neuroarchitecture.
The term has become increasingly visible in the design world, sometimes with a level of certainty that the research itself does not yet support. It is a particular moment many disciplines go through, when an idea appears, often compelling and intuitive, and suddenly it is everywhere. It moves faster than its evidence base, faster than its definitions, and certainly faster than its methodological grounding.
In architecture today, neuroarchitecture is one of those terms. But if we set aside the rhetoric and look carefully at the academic field, a more precise picture emerges.
This article offers a perspective on mapping neuroarchitecture as it appears in academic publications from roughly the past twenty-five years. It is not a final definition of the field, nor a claim that the boundaries are settled. Rather, it traces the patterns that become visible when we look at peer-reviewed research, reviews, and scholarly publications that connect architecture with neuroscience, physiology, cognition, and behaviour.
My usual disclaimer: Like many interdisciplinary fields, neuroarchitecture is still evolving.
What follows is therefore a snapshot, a reading of where the field appears to be now, based on the published academic literature. This means the article is primarily concerned with neuroarchitecture as a research field, rather than with every way the term is currently used in practice, consultancy, training, or social media.
Applied work is important, and many designers are trying to translate this evidence into real projects. But application is not the same as evidence generation. A design claim becomes stronger when it can show which research it draws from, how that research applies to the context, and where its limits are.
A (Cautious) Overview of the Field
Neuroarchitecture can currently be understood as an interdisciplinary research area that brings together architecture, neuroscience, psychology, physiology, and environmental design. At its simplest, it asks how the built environment affects the brain, body, emotion, cognition, and behaviour.
This does not mean that neuroarchitecture is a single theory. It is not like Gibson’s affordance theory, Appleton’s prospect-refuge theory, or Kaplan’s attention restoration theory, where there is a central explanatory idea that can be traced through the literature. It is closer to a research programme: a collection of questions, methods, and emerging findings about how people respond to spatial environments.
For reference:
"Gibson’s Affordance Theory in Architecture: Understanding the Design of Possibility" - https://www.archpsych.co.uk/post/gibson-affordance-theory-in-architecture-understanding-the-design-of-possibility
"Prospect-Refuge Theory" - https://www.archpsych.co.uk/post/prospect-refuge-theory
Early writing in the field framed architecture and neuroscience as disciplines that could learn from each other. Sternberg and Wilson (2006) described the search for common ground between neuroscience and architecture, while Eberhard (2009) argued that neuroscience could help architecture better understand why environments matter. More recent reviews describe neuroarchitecture as the study of cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses to architectural space, often through tools such as EEG, virtual reality, eye-tracking, heart rate variability, electrodermal activity, fMRI, or fNIRS (Higuera-Trujillo et al., 2021; Lee et al., 2022; Jaberi et al., 2026).
So, neuroarchitecture is not simply “architecture that is good for the brain”. It may be described more accurately as an approach of studying architectural experience through measurable responses in the brain and body.
Background
Of course, the idea that environments affect people is not new. Environmental psychology, architectural psychology, healthcare design, ergonomics, and building science have all been studying human-environment relationships for decades.
What makes neuroarchitecture distinct is not the claim that space affects us - that already has a long history. The distinction is the attempt to observe those effects through neuroscientific and physiological methods specifically. This is why the field often overlaps with older and more established areas. A study on light and cognitive performance may sit within indoor environmental quality research. A study on stress in a hospital waiting room may belong to healthcare design. A study on nature exposure and mood may come from environmental psychology.
Neuroarchitecture draws from all of these, but becomes more specific when it asks how those experiences are reflected in neural activity, physiological stress, attention, perception, or embodied response.
This overlap can make the field difficult to define. Some relevant studies use the word “neuroarchitecture” directly. Others use terms such as architecture and neuroscience, neuroaesthetics, embodied cognition, neurourbanism, or physiological responses to built environments. For that reason, the academic field is probably best understood as a family of connected research areas rather than a single, neatly bounded discipline.
A perspective in questions
If we map the literature, neuroarchitecture does not resolve into a single narrative, it clusters around a set of recurring questions, some of which are explored below.
1. Can architectural form be measured in the brain?
Research on contour, enclosure, and ceiling height shows that people tend to prefer curvilinear over rectilinear forms, and that spatial proportions can influence aesthetic judgment and approach–avoidance behaviour (Vartanian et al., 2013; Vartanian et al., 2015). More recent work suggests that architectural environments can shape preference, social and cognitive processing, influencing how we perceive others’ actions and expressions (Presti et al., 2023).
These findings are consistent, but should be used with caution. They tell us that geometry matters, but they do not, on their own, tell us how to design a whole building.
2. Can we capture experience objectively?
This is where the field has grown most rapidly. A large body of recent work combines virtual reality with EEG and other biosensors, attempting to measure human response to architectural scenarios in controlled conditions (Taherysayah et al., 2024; Zhao et al., 2025; Jaberi et al., 2026).
The ambition is to:
Reduce reliance on subjective reporting
Capture real-time responses
Translate findings into design-relevant data
And technically, this is increasingly possible, but the challenge is not measurement. It is interpretation. As a few reviews point out, the field has become methodologically sophisticated but conceptually uneven. The tools are improving faster than the frameworks used to make sense of the data (Gramann, 2024; Jaberi et al., 2026).
3. How does the environment affect stress and performance?
Another cluster connects architecture to physiological stress and cognitive function. Studies show that environments can influence markers such as cortisol, heart rate variability, and task performance, particularly in controlled or simulated settings (Fich et al., 2014; Grasso-Cladera et al., 2025).
Parallel work on indoor environmental quality reinforces this:
Lighting affects alertness and circadian regulation
Noise impacts attention and cognitive load
Air quality influences performance and fatigue
Thermal comfort affects comfort, stress, and concentration
The contribution to this evidence base is not about discovering that these factors matter, but attempting to trace their effects into neural and physiological processes (Rad et al., 2026).
4. Can environments support restoration?
A related line of research looks at healthcare and other types of restorative environments.
There is reasonably consistent evidence that certain environmental cues, particularly those associated with nature or reduced sensory stress, can modulate short-term physiological states (Higuera-Trujillo et al., 2020; Valentine, 2024).
This research can support the idea that certain environmental conditions may influence short-term physiological or emotional states. It is currently less able, to show that design features alone produce long-term clinical outcomes. This does not make the research less valuable; it simply helps define the scale of the claim we can responsibly make from it.
5. What happens at the scale of the city?
At the urban scale, the field becomes even more complex. The emergence of neurourbanism reflects an attempt to connect neuroscience with urban mental health, exploring how density, greenery, spatial structure, and city conditions influence emotional and cognitive states (Adli et al., 2017; Ancora et al., 2022). Alongside this, researchers such as Colin Ellard (2015) have helped make the psychological and physiological effects of urban environments more visible, particularly through work on how streetscapes, building façades, complexity, and urban form shape attention, emotion, and behaviour.
The challenge here is not only measurement, but causality. Urban experience is even more entangled with social context, inequality, mobility, pollution, exposure duration, personal history, and the meanings people attach to place. As a result, the literature remains conceptually strong but empirically cautious.
What claims does current evidence support?
A careful reading of the literature suggests that neuroarchitecture has a credible evidence base, but that evidence is narrower than popular accounts often imply - more on why I raise this later.
It supports the idea that people are measurably sensitive to spatial conditions. Architectural variables such as contour, enclosure, height, room scale, environmental complexity, lighting, sound, and sensory atmosphere can influence short-term perception, appraisal, attention, stress, and comfort. Neural and physiological measures can detect differences between environmental conditions, especially when combined with self-report and behavioural measures. It also supports the idea that architectural experience is not only visual or symbolic. It is embodied. Spaces are processed through movement, attention, emotion, physiology, memory, and action-readiness. This is one reason why neuroarchitecture connects so naturally with theories of affordance and environmental perception.
What the literature does not support is equally important. For example there are currently no universal design rules based on brain response. Literature also does not show that one form produces one emotion in all users. Studies do not 'prove' that short-term changes in EEG, cortisol, or heart rate automatically translate into long-term wellbeing, or claim that virtual environments are equivalent to real buildings.
It is important to remember that this is not a failure of the field. It is simply the current state of the evidence.
Supports | Does not support |
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Why context still matters
One of the recurring challenges in neuroarchitecture and people-environment studies more generally, is that built environments are complex. A room is not only a set of measurable variables. It is also a social, cultural, functional, and personal situation. The same window can mean daylight, distraction, surveillance, freedom, glare, connection, or exposure depending on the person and context. The same enclosed space can feel calming to one person and restrictive to another. The same level of stimulation can feel energising in a gallery and overwhelming in a hospital.
This is perhaps one of the most important things the academic literature shows: neuroarchitecture is not a shortcut around complexity. It is another way of studying it.
This matters because neuroarchitecture can sometimes appear to promise a more objective route into design. And in some ways, it does offer that, as it gives researchers tools to measure aspects of experience that may not be fully captured through interviews or questionnaires alone. But objectivity does not remove interpretation i.e. a physiological signal still needs to be understood in context, a brain response does not explain itself etc. It has to be connected carefully to the environment, the task, the person, and the situation.
Popular portrayals of neuroarchitecture
In popular media particularly, neuroarchitecture often appears with a much stronger sense of promise than the academic literature can currently support. It is often presented as a way to design spaces that calm the nervous system, improve wellbeing, increase productivity, support healing, or even make cities better for the brain. This is a point that deserves some caution.
Some of this public conversation is grounded in serious research and institutional work, especially where it is linked to organisations, researchers, or practices using clear methods and tools such as VR, EEG, eye-tracking, physiological measurement, or post-occupancy study to derive insights.
But the wider media landscape is much more mixed.
The term now circulates through magazines, podcasts, courses, consultancies, LinkedIn posts, Instagram explainers, TEDx talks, and design-branding content. In these spaces, neuroscience language can become compressed into simple claims: curved forms calm us, high ceilings activate creativity, biophilic design heals the brain, boring buildings are bad for health. These claims may point towards interesting research questions, but they often travel without the careful context that academic work requires: who was studied, under what conditions, using which measures, for how long, and with what limitations.
This is not to dismiss public communication. Popular media plays an important role in making research visible, and the popular version of neuroarchitecture is not entirely separate from the academic field. But it often moves faster than it. It translates, amplifies, simplifies, and sometimes overstates.
The issue is not translation itself, but what happens when translation becomes simplification, and simplification becomes certainty.
A field in formation
What emerges from the research is not a completed discipline (yet), but neither is it just a fashionable label.
Neuroarchitecture can currently be seen as a structured but emerging field. It has identifiable research clusters, a rapidly developing toolkit, and some repeatable findings around short-term response to space. It also has clear limitations: methods are not yet standardised, outcome measures vary across studies, and translation into design practice remains difficult. For now, the most careful reading may be that:
Neuroarchitecture demonstrates that people are measurably sensitive to spatial conditions, but does not by itself tell us how to design universally.
This may change as the field is still evolving, and its boundaries will likely shift as more studies move into real-world environments, methods become more robust, and s architecture becomes more confident in how it interprets evidence from the brain and body.
What neuroarchitecture is not
At the same time, it is also worth being clear about what neuroarchitecture is not.
It is not a design style, a wellbeing aesthetic, new branding term, or a universal recipe for how spaces should look.
It is not a guarantee that a curved wall, a high ceiling, a timber surface, a view of nature, or a particular colour palette will produce the same response in every person.
It is also not the same as saying that architecture can directly “rewire the brain” simply because people spend time in designed environments.
Certainly not a retrospective label for any architecture concerned with human wellbeing.
The academic field is more cautious than that. It studies measurable relationships between spatial conditions and human responses, but those responses are always shaped by context, task, culture, memory, bodily state, neurotype, personal history, and social situation.
A space that feels restorative to one person may feel exposed to another. A stimulating workplace may support one activity and overwhelm another. A quiet room may be calming in one context and isolating in another.
For this reason, neuroarchitecture should not be treated as a shortcut. At its best, it adds another layer of evidence alongside other traditions. It helps us ask more precise questions about perception, attention, stress, emotion, and behaviour. It does not remove the need to interpret those responses carefully.
Neuroarchitecture also becomes difficult to define when the term is used for any research or design work concerned with trauma, stress, healing, sensory experience, or wellbeing. These topics may involve the brain and body, but that alone does not place them within the academic field of neuroarchitecture. To make that connection convincingly, the work should ideally show how spatial conditions are being related to neural, physiological, cognitive, emotional, or behavioural response, and how that relationship is grounded in relevant research. Without that chain, the work may still be important, but it may sit more accurately within social studies, environmental psychology, healthcare design, inclusive design, sensory urbanism, trauma-informed design, or urban wellbeing.
Why this matters for design
For designers, neuroarchitecture is most useful when treated as a way of refining design hypotheses:
What might this spatial condition be doing to perception, attention, stress, or comfort?
How could we test that more rigorously?
Where does existing evidence support or contradict our assumptions?
Where are we extrapolating beyond what the evidence can justify?
Applying research from neuroscience, psychology, or physiology in the practice of architecture requires more than citing a study or using brain-based language. It involves understanding the study design, the population, the measures used, the context of the finding, and whether the evidence can reasonably transfer to a real project. A practitioner may use neuroarchitecture as a useful lens, but the strength of that work depends on how carefully the evidence is interpreted. Without that care, the language of neuroarchitecture just makes ordinary design assumptions sound more scientific than they really are, reducing the credibility of the field and potentially putting people at risk.
Neuroarchitecture is one part of a larger effort to understand how architecture is experienced by the people who live, work, learn, recover, and move through it.
Summary
Neuroarchitecture is often described as the future of design, but the research tells a more careful and more interesting story. Rather than a universal rulebook for “designing for the brain”, it is an emerging interdisciplinary field that studies how architectural and urban environments affect perception, attention, stress, emotion, cognition, physiology, and behaviour. This article maps what the academic literature from the past twenty-five years actually supports, where the evidence is still developing, and why context, interpretation, and design judgement still matter.
Archontia Manolakelli is an ARB Registered Architect and Behavioural Design Researcher based in Manchester, UK. Her work embeds behavioural science into the design of everyday spaces as a quiet force for change, helping workplaces, schools, and civic environments better reflect the people who use them. Grounded in evidence-based practice, her approach bridges the gap between theory and application, academia and practice, science and intuition.
Hello. Thank you for stopping by, I hope you have enjoyed your reading! If you have any questions or feedback on this article, please don't hesitate to drop me a line on LinkedIn or via email.
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