The Girl Before:
The new hit HBO series is a spooky tale of environmental psychology
I’ve just started watching the new HBOMax series “The Girl Before” (non-spoiler alert: I’ve only seen the first episode and I haven’t read the book on which its based so there’s little risk I’ll spoil your fun). From almost the first frame it struck me as a story that I would love to have written myself. The series is a darkly psychological tale of lived and re-lived trauma, but the unusual wonder of it is that, in a way, the star of the show is the house in which the story is set.
To give away some bare points of plot (which, seriously low-stakes here, you’ll learn in about the first five minutes if you choose to watch), an architect has built a minimalist house in London that comes with an attractive below-market rental price but a daunting set of rules that must be followed in order for a potential tenant to be approved (no pets, no plants, no children, almost no “stuff”). Without giving away anything else, one of the central plot questions is whether a house can change who you are—though there are plenty of hints that we’re going to go much darker than this as the short, four-part series progresses.
This central plot question presses a lot of buttons for me. Much of the work that I’ve done at the intersection of psychology and built design has focused on exactly such questions, and my immediate, reflexive answer to this question is a resounding YES! It’s for this reason that I’ve argued that architects carry a heavy social responsibility to understand the effects of their designs on those of us who occupy them. I think that most architects understand this (and in fact I know some very good ones for whom this is their main motivation — to design for good), but not everyone does. In this series, as I understand it from what I’ve seen so far, the architect who designed the house that stars in the show had different ideas. This man has tried to design a house that shapes the behavior of its occupants in a very specific way, not for their good but for his own. In a way, it’s a marvelous ironic riff on the accusations sometimes cast at “starchitects” accused of designing for attention and for their own glory rather than for any kind of societal good.
Though it doesn’t go very deep on this, the series also delves into responsiveness in architectural settings. It’s a debate that we’ve been having for quite some time now: whether or not it is actually a good thing to design a building that can sense and respond to its occupants. It isn’t hard to think of practical advantages to living in a home that knows when you get up, what you like for breakfast, and what playlist you’d like to hear when you get home from work. But there’s also the overhanging question about control. Who’s in charge of the algorithm? And does that person or entity really know who you are, or are they attempting to operate on a boiled-down cartoon version of you? Or worse, make you into some new, more compliant, predictable you?
This series, and the book that it’s based on, is not completely pristine territory. Some of J.G. Ballard’s best work, like the novel High Rise and the short story collection Vermilion Sands trod with frightening foresight in these territories and, in the world of the real, entire urban developments have been brought down over dystopian fears of control of human behavior on grand scale by digital overlords. But as we move into a future that will be increasingly filled with responsiveness powered by sophisticated AI, it’s worth asking the question over and over again: we might gain some comfort and convenience by relinquishing control over our lives to machines that “know” us, but at what cost?
In future offerings here, I want to talk about the role of messy chance, complexity, vitality and autonomy in environmental design at all scales from the interior of a minimalist house to a cityscape. I’m somewhat obsessed with these themes at present and I was genuinely excited to see them arise in a new little bit of popular culture.