This architect builds a career on psychology

She works with people to design buildings that reflect who they are.

By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff

Roberta Feldman catches a breather between her morning and afternoon appointments and dashes to the cafeteria to pick up a quickie lunch of Cheetos and coffee-'more than I get for lunch most days,' she says with a laugh. It's an unlikely combination by most standards, but then so is the blend of careers she's chosen: Feldman is an architect with a PhD in psychology.

An affable type who's always stopping for a chat as she walks the campus of the University of Illinois (UIC) at Chicago, Feldman is as quick to joke about her unusual career as she is about her makeshift lunch.

'People are always asking me what an architect does with psychology,' says Feldman, a professor in UIC's School of Architecture. 'I tell them I psychoanalyze buildings.'

Feldman may sound glib about her work, but underneath the jokes she's dead serious. 'I'm invested in making better, more responsive buildings and environments for people,' she says.

As a psychologist, Feldman strives to design living spaces that reflect the way people view themselves-who they are and aspire to be. And as an architect with a social conscience-a friend calls her a 'feminist architect'-lately she's brought that approach to her work with people, mostly women, living in Chicago's notoriously neglected public housing. One of the communities she's worked with, Wentworth Gardens in the South Armour Square neighborhood, needed retail stores to meet residents' shopping needs. They wanted large superstores, which they associated with prosperity. A believer in candor, Feldman told them their community couldn't economically support superstores. But she could design a large-scale shopping center to house smaller stores. She sketched out her idea and 'they told me they were thrilled with it,' she says.

'How a building looks, how it's spatially organized and what materials it's made of matters to people whether they're poor or rich,' says Feldman. She believes the impersonal high rises of Chicago's public housing, surrounded by anonymous open spaces, are the antithesis of good design. 'You need to design a building that people can make their own, that they can use for their own purposes and that somehow expresses something about themselves, a place they want to take care of and be proud of.'

Feldman designs such buildings by 'getting down with people and finding out what they want,' says one of her colleagues, community sociologist Susan Stall, PhD. Whether Feldman's helping them convert an abandoned playlot into an attractive school playground or repaint fading store façades, she listens carefully to their ideas, then she explains the realities of putting them into practice. 'She's open and frank about the way design works, instead of mystifying it further like a lot of architects do,' says Stall. 'That's why she's so well accepted by the public housing residents. Her psychology training adds a `people side.''

Feldman's fondness for speaking her mind extends to all the circles she moves in. She talks openly to other architects about her concern that architecture is a tough field for women-often excluded because construction crews prefer working for men. And she advises her fellow researchers in environmental psychology that they can't ignore politics, claiming that people's rights to use and control space are central to the way people relate to their surroundings.

'While many of us take space for granted and consider it a mere backdrop to activity,' she says, 'low-income people have to organize and fight to occupy it.' (A button on her bulletin board reads 'Apathy is the aphrodisiac of corruption,' an activist's mantra she explains.)

Feldman graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania, and is the first woman to be tenured in UIC's School of Architecture. She's a major mover on grants to improve Chicago's distressed communities, and is obviously proud of those accomplishments. 'I'm not humble,' she chuckles, 'not even vaguely.'

A city person

Feldman grew up in New York City, with a mother forever redecorating and refurbishing their apartment. A self-proclaimed 'city person,' Feldman lives in the Chicago neighborhood of Lincoln Park in a Victorian home.

'I feel more comfortable in a designed city environment than out in nature,' she says. She admits that New York's 'exquisite buildings' influenced her decision to study architecture.

'I remember the view from my father's office building in lower Manhattan,' she says. 'It was magical. I felt like I was on top of the world with the panorama of all the buildings below.' Still, she says her career choice was mostly pragmatic. She excelled in art and science, so it made sense for her to pursue architecture.

She was captivated by a course that explored 'environmental determinism'-the notion that people's behavior is shaped entirely by their physical surroundings. As she talks about the course, Feldman stops eating Cheetos and puts down her coffee cup. Her voice lowers and intensifies.

'I suddenly got exposed to a whole new way of thinking about the built environment,' she says. 'The creation of the built environment isn't just about manipulating form. It's not just there for our visual pleasure, but has an enormous influence on the occupants. It was a major shift for me intellectually.'

Why psychology?

Feldman soon got the chance to explore enviornmental determinism by designing planned communities called 'new towns.' They were modeled on the environmental determinist tenet that the design of a neighborhood shapes human behavior. The model sought to encourage social relations by grouping housing around courtyards and within walking distance to neighborhood centers that featured a school, stores and recreational facilities. At the time, Feldman lived in what is perhaps the best-known new town-Columbia, Md., near Baltimore.

But she eventually drew the conclusion that Columbia wasn't working as planned.

'People didn't walk to the stores in the community center,' she says. 'They got in their cars and went to the supermarkets, so the lovely little town center's stores closed down, and [the town center] became pretty dead.'

Suddenly doubting the environmental determinism she'd learned in architecture school, she sought new insight in an environmental psychology PhD program at the City University of New York.

For her dissertation-which looked at how people identify themselves through the places they call their homes and neighborhoods-she surveyed and interviewed people in Chicago and Denver and found that most identified with 'settlement stereotypes.' Those who called themselves city people, for example, described themselves as 'urban pioneers,' who valued diversity and vibrant communities. Suburbanites wanted privacy, safety and closeness to nature. Country people sought a simple way of life.

Feldman drew two conclusions from her dissertation. One was that people interact with their surroundings, but aren't molded by them. Another was that there isn't an ideal type of settlement; rather different people in various life stages prefer a variety of housing types, not just suburban homes, despite developers' assumptions to the contrary.

The politics of space

Building on the notion that people interact with their surroundings, Feldman became interested in what it takes for public housing residents to make their homes more livable. The work, which she embarked on after accepting an academic position at UIC in 1984, brought together her interests in place, identity and architecture, with politics. 'I'm my father's daughter,' she says, noting that her father was an activist lawyer in New York City.

Today, Feldman believes that Chicago's public housing residents are misunderstood.

'The media typically portray public housing as irreparable and occupied by pathological people-places that should be shut down,' says Feldman. 'I know differently. I have met incredible women who are struggling to make this a better home for themselves and their neighbors, who are fighting the battles to keep their homes safe and decent and improve their physical environment.'

To help community residents in their struggles, she co-founded the City Design Center in UIC's College of Architecture and the Arts with urban planner George Hemmens, PhD, a multidisciplinary collaborative research and outreach group that handles a range of urban revitalization projects. Feldman has managed the center's efforts to improve dilapidated commercial streets and design a shopping center, playground and apartment complex for seniors.

'She's sensitive to the user's satisfaction, which is unusual in architecture,' says Hemmens.

But Feldman's says it's difficult to sensitize developers to her user perspective. 'Their main concern is how many units you can get for the money,' she says.

She's not easily discouraged though. She'll keep trying to get her message across, and she'll keep looking for better ways to design socially responsive buildings and neighborhoods.

'When my husband and I visit a foreign city, he's staring at the people and I'm staring at the buildings,' says Feldman. 'I'm looking at what the forms are, what they're constructed of, how people are engaging with the space. I'm always looking up.'



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