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Sixty years later Salk's hunch is now backed up by empirical evidence as new research in neuroscience hints at how our surroundings affect feelings and behavior. In the current issue of Scientific American Mind, Emily Anthes describes how ceiling height, colors and other design factors influence attention and creativity. Scientists are just beginning to address these questions, in part by studying changes in brain activity as subjects make their way through virtual reality rooms.

The neuroscience of design is still in its infancy, but it has its own organization, The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego, and some architecture schools now include some basic neuroscience in their curriculum. Are we on the verge of a new field of emotionally intelligent design? Here are few early findings:

A study by neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School found that faced with photographs of everyday objects--sofas, watches, etc.--subjects instinctively preferred items with rounded edges over those with sharp angles. Mose Bar, a neuroscientist, speculates that our brains are hard-wired to avoid sharp angles because we read them as dangerous. He used a brain scan for a similar study and found that the amygdala, a portion of the brain that registers fear, was more active when people looked at sharp-edged objects.

A study published earlier this year in the journal Science found that we remember words and other details better when surrounded by red,and that we're more creative and imaginative in the presence of blue. So if your staff is, say, proofreading or debriefing they're better off in a red room. But if they're brainstorming ideas for a new marketing campaign, blue is the color.

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The Kalita is one of only three theaters designed by Wright (photos of the other two: here and here). Completed nine months after Wright's death and two months after the New York art museum opened, the Kalita, frankly, is not the masterpiece the Guggenheim is — it lacks the open, airy gracefulness of that building's internal spiral and its radical counter-response to the city blocks around it. But as Wright's last completed building, the Kalita is something of a "little Gugenheim." It applies a number of similar ideas about form and function, this time to a theater rather than a museum, and it received national attention when it opened as an innovative design (reflecting not just Wright's thinking but also that of founding artistic director Paul Baker).

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But more often than not, what you feel is the immense strain Mr. Calatrava and his clients are under to try to justify the hall’s existence. Retail space has been added along the base of the great hall and along a second-floor balcony, which should draw a few visitors but risks transforming the entire space into one of the world’s most excessive shopping malls.

And in a particularly perverse decision PATH riders won’t be able to get from the train platforms directly to the street. Instead they will have to walk halfway along the hall’s upper balcony and past dozens of shops before exiting into one of the flanking towers — a suffocating experience no matter how beautiful the spaces turn out to be.

These problems are amplified by Mr. Calatrava’s seeming refusal to disturb the sculptural purity of his creation. Some have already pointed out that only two small entries, at each end of the dome, connect the main plaza to the hall, as if the architect were afraid of exposing his inner world to the chaos outside. I noticed something else on my visit to the show: a ring of marble benches now surrounds the base of the glass dome, so that standing in the plaza you will be able to see only a small segment of the great hall below. Instead the eye is drawn up to the grandeur of Mr. Calatrava’s structure. Life is secondary.

All of this would be discouraging enough given the number of other worthy transportation projects in New York City. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority had to redesign its new Fulton Street station to keep within its tight budget, even though it will serve thousands more passengers a day. Despite years of planning, Pennsylvania Station’s cramped dehumanizing spaces remain one of the most shameful chapters in the city’s architectural history, partly because authorities can’t find a way to pay for a renovation.

Mr. Calatrava’s design also embodies a deeper, more troubling history: the toxic climate of those first years after the Sept. 11 attacks. While the city grieved, politicians were vowing to rebuild as fast as possible, as if that would somehow accelerate the healing process. Practical considerations were set aside. Jingoism ruled. Egotism dominated over softer, gentler voices.

Under such conditions it should surprise no one that what once promised to be one of ground zero’s most triumphant architectural achievements is hollow at its core.

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The impetus behind this exhibition is the flexibility of the word slough, which has various interpretations. Pronounced slew, slough can describe a bog-like, swampy, dark, primordial and somewhat mysterious realm. The alternate and less used, but maybe also appropriate interpretation, is a state of moral degradation or spiritual dejection that one cannot extract oneself from. Pronounced sluff, slough refers to that which has been cast aside or shed off, like a skin. It can also describe the manner in which material tends to accumulate at the edges of a performed task, such as the accumulation of dust on the rim of a fan, snow on the edge of a shovel, or trash in the breakdown lane of a highway.

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The Maldives is an archipelago of 1,190 islands in the Indian Ocean, with an average elevation of four feet. Even a slight rise in global sea levels, which many scientists predict will occur by the end of this century, could submerge most of the Maldives. Last November, when Nasheed proposed moving all 300,000 Maldivians to safer territory, he named India, Sri Lanka and Australia as possible destinations and described a plan that would use tourism revenues from the present to establish a sovereign wealth fund with which he could buy a new country — or at least part of one — in the future. “We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own, and so we have to buy land elsewhere,” Nasheed said in November.

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