A review by hilaritas
Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

2.0

This book never delivers. Ellard fills out a lot of pages with various bric-a-brac, from tantalizing summaries of actual psychological studies on architecture or effects of place (few), passages geeking out on the VR rigs in his lab (many), and fatuous speculating on evolutionary psychology and/or the general metaphysics of place (scattered and scatterbrained). I found little insightful here, although it wasn't terrible for all that. He mentions lots of interesting stuff, primarily channeled as non sequiturs, but at least it reminded me of other, better books where I first encountered the ideas. These include references to Gaston Bachelard, the importance of the Black Forest to Heidegger, infant perceptions of aggression, Becker's theories about the terror of death, and Le Corbusier's ideas on city planning. It just never had much to do with how architecture affects our psychology, which is what I thought he was writing about. Oh well.