By Stephen Burton | Featuring Mark McLelland, Experience Place
We have all felt it. that subtle tightening in the chest when walking through a precinct of glass, steel and polished concrete. It looks clean. It looks expensive. It looks ‘finished’.
But it doesn’t feel good.
For a long time, we dismissed this feeling as just personal taste. Some people like modern, some like heritage. But as it turns out, it’s not about taste. It’s biology.
In this episode of The Placemakers, I spoke with Mark McLelland, founder of Experience Place about the role of art in the public realm. Mark didn’t just talk about statues or murals. He talked about the biological impact of boring surfaces.
Mark points to research from the US exploring how our brains react to building facades. The findings are confronting for proponents of minimalism.
“Research by an urban academic and neuroscientist in New York has shown that… an un-relieved facade… actually gives rise to stress hormones in our body that ultimately make us sick,” Mark explains.
When we strip detail out of our cities in the name of cost-efficiency or modernism, we aren’t just making them ugly. We are making them stressful. The human brain evolved in nature, a place of infinite fractal complexity, leaves, bark, light and shadow. When we are confronted with a blank, reflective concrete wall, our brains don’t know what to do with it.
“It’s no surprise we don’t feel great when we’re in those environments,” Mark says.
The antidote to this sterile environment isn’t necessarily a multi-million dollar sculpture. It’s what Mark calls “urban patina”.
It is the texture of the city. It’s the handrail you touch, the pattern in the paving, the way light hits a textured brick wall rather than a flat sheet of glass.
“It’s art process and art thinking… manifested in all those objects and furnishings,” Mark says.
This is where the role of the artist changes. In the old model, we would design a precinct and then ‘plonk’ a piece of art in the middle to cheer it up. Mark calls this “plonk art”, and thankfully, he says few people want it anymore.
Instead, we need to bring artists in at the very beginning to work on the “manifestation of the urban realm”. We need them to design the door handles, the seating and the lighting. We need to create layers of meaning that allow the eye to travel and the mind to engage.
Beyond the biology of texture, there is the sociology of belonging.
“If you can’t see yourself in the public realm and can’t recognise yourself and your culture there’s no sense of place for you here,” Mark says.
This goes beyond putting up a plaque. It’s about embedding stories - particularly First Nations stories - into the fabric of the built environment. It’s about creating a landscape that acknowledges the “spirit of Country” and the layers of history that existed before the concrete was poured.
When we do this right, we don’t just get a pretty street. We get a place that lowers our cortisol levels and raises our sense of belonging.
“What we’re after is that urban experience where you walk into a new environment and your spirits are just lifted,” Mark says.
That feeling isn’t an accident. It’s designed.
🎧 Listen to the episode
We discuss the death of ‘plonk art’ and how to integrate culture into construction.
📄 Accessibility & reference
Prefer to read? Download the full word-for-word transcript of this interview.
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