How the built environment enhances your mind's health
A look at Tye Farrow's extraordinary new book, Constructing Health. He is the heir to one of my architectural heroes, Richard Neutra.
I often write about how our homes and buildings are making us sick, from gas stoves to PFAS to VOCs to crappy lighting and mould, things that we might call pathogenic. I rarely talk about how they could make us healthier, a process that Tye Farrow calls salutogenesis, a term coined by Aaron Antonovsky, who thought doctors should think more about health and illness not as one or the other but as a continuous variable the "health-ease versus dis-ease continuum." (when I first saw the word dis-ease in Farrow’s book, I thought it was a typo.)
Farrow is the author of Constructing Health from the University of Toronto Press. From the introduction:
“Constructing Health explores the role that our built environments play in encouraging, enhancing, and causing ecological, physical, societal, and mind health. Through a discussion of neurological science, research, and a series of case studies, this book will help us better understand how our surroundings make us feel- and how they can make us feel better.”
Farrow is not only an architect but also has a Master of Neuroscience Applied to Architectural Design from the University of Venice IUAV. He is concerned particularly with “mind health” and asks,
“What if we celebrated design that stimulates enriched experiences based on qualities and values of generosity, variety and vitality, authenticity, hope, nature, silence and stillness, solidity and intimacy? What if we could construct health?”
I interviewed Tye for Treehugger for one of my last posts on Treehugger and put the recording on YouTube. I wrote at the time, “Spending an hour listening to Farrow was an extraordinary experience.”
Reading his book is also an extraordinary experience. It is packed with so much information, so much research, and it is written so well. Then he goes and takes these concepts to design extraordinary buildings, mostly for education and health care.
His new book will be invaluable for the “What is a Healthy Home?” chapter in my next book, in which I have been preoccupied with Richard Neutra.
In 1929, Neutra built the Lovell Health House, designed to capture sunlight and fresh air. But Neutra was also influenced by Freud and believed that his houses could cure neuroses and that houses could affect the occupants’ psyches. According to Silvia Lavin in her book “Form Follows Libido,” and quoted in the New Yorker, he was concerned about all of the senses.
Neutra saw himself as a therapist—easing the stresses of modern life, increasing clients’ comfort. He even supplied a certain aphrodisiac atmosphere for the young couples with whom he liked to work. Families were asked to fill out questionnaires about their daily routines. Some sample queries: “Can you sleep when the sun shines into your room?” “Do you notice or enjoy the dinner smell?” “Does the ‘whiff of nature’ mean much to you?” “What kind of music do you play on your gramophone, soft or noisy?”
Almost a hundred years later, Farrow is asking similar questions. In the chapter “Awakening All Our Senses: Creating Enriched Environments,” Farrow explains how our senses work and includes two that are not well known:
While we have considered the five commonly known senses of sight, scent, sound, touch, and taste, two lesser-known senses are also important as they relate to architecture - those of proprioception and the vestibular system. Proprioception is our sense of our body in space, while the vestibular system regulates our sense of movement and balance, both of which can change dramatically within the same space, depending on where we are within that space.
He then notes the importance of connection to nature, the use of wood, which “increases well-being, improves concentration, and leads to greater personal and professional satisfaction.” (Farrow uses a lot of wood in a very dramatic fashion) He discusses one of my favourite topics, lighting and circadian rhythms, and the importance of natural and high-quality light:
“One compelling study connecting light with human performance compared the test scores of more than 20,000 students, primarily on the West Coast of the United States. It found that students with the most balanced daylight in their classrooms performed 20 percent better in math tests and over 25 percent faster on reading tests than students in classrooms with poor lighting or glare."
Even our sense of smell comes into play. “Many natural materials, such as wood, stone, and earth, cause olfactory stimulation that can reduce our blood pressure and cortisol levels.”
Farrow suggests that most of our buildings today are “transactional,” doing only what is asked of them, whereas he believes buildings can be transformative. His use of wood certainly does much more than simply holding up the roof.
Farrow quotes Richard Neutra in the book, and in many ways, he is heir to him. Neutra worked mainly in steel and concrete, unusual and innovative materials at the time. Esther McCoy wrote in Richard Neutra for the Masters of World Architecture series:
“Neutra took nothing for granted, but reexamined every building practice; no member or detail or material escaped his scrutiny. His buildings of the twenties and early thirties brought into the folds of architecture various elements that would never again be alien.”
Farrow is doing similar wonders with wood, turning it into sculptural forms, “connecting the dots between mind, environment and performance.” McCoy wrote of Neutra:
His philosophy of design grows out of his interest in the biological sciences, whose researches in man's responses to a multitude of stimuli furnish him a new basis for the understanding of the individual. Every aspect of building and every building material has been studied except human material, he says. "A workable understanding of how our psychosomatic organism ticks, information on sensory clues which wind its gorgeous clockwork or switch it this way or that, undoubtedly will someday belong in the designer's mental tool chest.”
Neutra was perhaps ahead of his time; We know much more about how our psychosomatic organism ticks. Tye Farrow has given us a marvellous mental tool chest full of information, ideas, and inspiration. It belongs on every designer’s bookshelf.
Unfortunate use of that last photo...the irony is overwhelming.
Interesting and very appropriate title CONSTRUCTING HEALTH. House, Street, neighbourhood, towns and cities where households live, work, entertain, move and socialize in micro, miso and macro levels of environment. Houses play an important and considerable amount of time one spend alone or in groups. A house can be build but a home is made of the inhabitants. The make up of health both mental and physical health based on the design of house. Yes I tool fell that it is important for an Architect to not just bult houses but essentially to treat that the designer is constructing HEALTH.