Environmental Psychology as Magic Pill. Another scientific challenge to traditional philosophy of architecture emerges in environmental psychology, which identifies ways that environmental factors such as color, shape, light, and circulatory pattern shape our visual reactions and behavioral patterns within and around the built environment. From such empirical insights, we can fashion constraints on architectural design principles that guide architectural creation, and devise corresponding solutions to particular design problems. As architects learn to exploit this information to advance design, we may ask whether an architectural object may be optimized by the lights of environmental psychology yet—and even consequently—deficient in some other, architecturally central respect. Satisfying an architectural object’s intended function or maximizing its utility may well include, or be advanced by, keen attention to environmental factors that influence attitudes to and use of that object. By contrast, moral or aesthetic deficiencies where environmental conditions are optimal seem real possibilities. A resulting question is whether, and to what degree, we could or should abandon moral or aesthetic drivers in architectural design if in the future we could design architectural objects to optimize environmental factors and so meet cognitive and emotional needs, thereby enhancing an architectural object’s reception but at moral or aesthetic expense.