The spaces we inhabit (and how they inhabit us)

Written by Laura Marajofsky, a vocational observer and critic. Writing in La Nación y cia. #Girlboss in Map of Barmaids & Related. Cultural production. Restless professional.

June 15, 2021

Can the spaces we inhabit be thought of as a natural continuation of our mental and emotional states? What do spaces reveal about us? What do psychology or more recent disciplines such as neuroarchitecture have to contribute on the subject? And how have events such as confinement impacted ideas around architectural development and spaces in homes?

An inescapable fact of modern life, perhaps more than ever, is that we spend much of our time in a few rooms in our homes, adapting our routines, activities, and even moods to them, and vice versa. In not surprising ways these spaces also occupy our thoughts and condition our expectations and desires. Can the spaces we inhabit be thought of as a natural continuation of our mental and emotional states?

“The fact that this time in the pandemic we have been conditioned to spend so much time in the same spaces in our homes makes our day to day even more routine than normal. The change of environment, feeling that you are active, moving or "changing air" already gives you a sense of orientation and clarity. Therefore, now more than ever is when people are realizing how much the type of environment in which they live influences, and have been forced to rethink and reconfigure the design of their personal spaces. Every day there are more people buying plants for the interiors, moving furniture to feel that they have changed scenarios, painting walls, and leaving the window open to ventilate the space when before they preferred air conditioning. How many changes have you made to your space in the last year?” says architect Stephany Knize, a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), currently working in the Netherlands.

If the psychology of urbanism and the design of smart cities have been investigated for some time by exponents such as Peter Zumthor or Jan Gehl, with the pandemic and the growing intersection between psyche, space and health, greater attention is being devoted to this topic. Added variables that have also become "fashionable" are sustainability and even accessibility - the concept of 15-minute Cities has to be one of the most repeated quarantine. It is also known that the inhabitants of large cities have higher rates of anxiety and neurosis, chronic stress and mental illness, among which depression and schizophrenia stand out.

In this context, it is not surprising that we are paying more attention to the 6x6 in which we spend a large part of our days, we eat, sleep and now we also work, celebrate birthdays, educate children and countless other tasks that build on each other like the days that this exhausting global pandemic has already been going on. However, the environmental influence on health, although highlighted by COVID, is not something new and in fact some approaches such as neuroarchitecture have been studied throughout the world and are already applied in areas as diverse as marketing, economics, politics or education.

The brave new world of neuroarchitecture

But what exactly is neuroarchitecture? It combines elements from various fields to become a multidisciplinary approach to architecture. Psychological and emotional aspects are considered when planning and designing environments that, at the end of the day, encourage certain states of mind in the individual. In this field, measurements of people's brain activity are used when they are interacting with a built space, while touching its materials, observing its dimensions or feeling its temperature. These data are combined with other variables such as heart rate or an electroencephalogram to observe how the individual's levels of stress or anxiety change.

“For a few years now, many fields of knowledge have been nourished by neuroscience. The denomination has arisen from adding the neuro prefix to the name of the receiving disciplines (neuromarketing, neuroergonomics, etc.). NeuroArchitecture arises from its application to architecture. This is a very recent term, which requires the application of the rigorous processes of neuroscience in the study of the cognitive-emotional dimension of architectural design, in order to offer optimized spaces (hospitals that favor the recovery of their patients, classrooms that promote learning, offices that contribute to increasing productivity, commercial spaces that favor the intention to purchase, homes that enhance well-being, etc.)”, explains Carmen Llinares Millán, professor at the Higher Technical School of Building Engineering at the University Polytechnic of Valencia, specialized in analyzing the psycho-emotional influence of architectural spaces on the human being.

Dr. Millán is a member, along with other professionals, of the LENI (European Laboratory of Immersive Neurotechnologies) and NeuroArquitectura of i3B. The NeuroArchitecture laboratory of the Institute for Research and Innovation in Bioengineering (i3B) of the Universitat Politècnica de València aims to understand and evaluate human behavior in the architectural space, analyzing the psychological, neurophysiological and behavioral responses of its users.

Some of the applications of the laboratory research include experiences at the health level focused on stress reduction, at the commercial level the design of company sales outlets, especially those that want to change their image, and in the urban area, developments linked to the sense of safety of pedestrians, since as they say, from the public there is a great demand. “At the teaching level, we are currently finishing developing a project whose objective is to find the design parameters that contribute to improving the cognitive abilities of university students. Many hours are spent in this type of space under high demand. The objective is that the design of the classrooms (through color, lighting or geometry) allows enhancing the relevant cognitive functions in the teaching-learning process”.

Other transversal methodologies that intersect with neuroarchitecture and that are often used for research are the Evidence-Based Design (EBD) or Design Based on Scientific Evidence, which is the application of the scientific method with the aim of finding evidence that links parameters of architectural design with answers in the user. Kansei engineering has also existed since the 1970s, which makes it possible to find the relationships between the emotional perception that a user has of a product, the different design parameters and the final assessment of the product.

“In this sense, it is important to highlight that in recent years we have seen how numerous professional offices advertise the realization of designs based on neuroarchitecture among their activities. Although it is possible that they apply the design guidelines obtained from previous work, always from the scientific field, it is very difficult to believe that in the development of their professional activity they follow the processes that this discipline requires. Working with neurophysiological records and environmental simulation requires a technical and scientific infrastructure that is very different from that of an architecture studio”, warns Millán about a tacit acknowledgment of appropriation of the term and/or misrepresentation for advertising purposes or to attract high-end clients. In fact, in recent times this branch is usually associated with the development of luxury homes.

The truth is that neuroarchitecture, unlike any experimental service that is promoted, is based on rigorous and replicable studies that show causal, quantifiable and rational relationships.

Another world, other spaces - and states of mind

“While the brain controls our behavior and genes drive brain design and structure, the environment can modulate gene function and ultimately brain structure by changing our behavior. By planning the environments in which we live, architectural design changes our brains and our behavior”, explained Fred Gage, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute and a disciple of Jonas Salk, who was considered the father of neuroarchitecture. The story goes that in the mid-1950s Salk, who was researching a polio vaccine, took an inspirational trip to Italy, where he spent time in the 13th-century Convent of San Francisco. He returned from his trip refreshed and with new ideas, so he summoned the architect Louis Kahn and together they built the Salk Institute, which today is a state-of-the-art research center based in California.

It does not seem difficult to think that if, at the height of neuroscience and with more and more discoveries in the field of epigenetics (the study of the relationship between genetic and environmental influences on DNA), we turn to space and think not only how is impacting our emotional health, but also how to obtain measurable evidence to develop designs and policies. In the era of big data, nothing and no one escapes quantifiable analysis, although access to neuroarchitecture services is still beyond the reach of the final consumer.

But then, how important is a discipline like neuroarchitecture today?

“The intensive and prolonged use of our homes during confinement has valued the role of the habitat and has reopened the debate on how we want our spaces to be. In fact, there are several authors who point to a new paradigm, placing the user at the center of design, attending mainly to their needs and requirements, to ensure that homes contribute, through their design, to improving our emotional well-being” Millan points out.

Furthermore, Knize explains that perhaps Louis Sullivan's famous phrase “form follows function” could today be replaced by “form follows feeling”. And it is that we have realized that both our emotions and thoughts are associated with the spaces that we ourselves create in our home. And that they are parameters that architects and interior designers are going to use to create a final experience that is integral and satisfactory. “A pandemic had to happen for us to pay more attention to creating healthy, sustainable environments that generate inspiration to carry out our daily activities. Each person has an innate ability to adapt to the space, and at the same time, make the space accommodate us. For this reason, and for what we are experiencing, it is so necessary to inhabit spaces that give feelings of hope and inspiration, so that the psychological or social trauma generated by the pandemic is not so deep and tragic.”

In this sense, concepts contemplated from neuroarchitecture to design spaces, such as views to the outside, proxemic (the physical distances that people maintain between each other to stay within a comfort zone depending on the relationship and the type of interaction they have ) or eye contact, today become more urgent issues than ever.

Color is another great enhancer or inhibitor. "I don't think it's a coincidence that at the beginning of the pandemic they put rainbows in the windows of houses as a way to symbolically represent the theme of hope after the rain," adds Marina Maiztegui, interior designer for the popular account @soloparami. “It is scientifically proven that one reacts in different ways to color: red makes you want to eat more, yellow and orange too, because they are colors associated in nature with food, with what is rich and healthy, that is why in Restaurants usually use these colors to whet your appetite. On the other hand, green and blue are associated with rest, blue because it has to do with the sky, the sea, with looking at something that has no end, that gives you peace and calm. Reason why they are used in bedrooms or in places to relax. The whole range of blues and greens have to do with that, they are colors that invite you to rest and relax. Orange is a color associated with creativity but it is also a very battery color. Color contributes a lot to generate sensations and it makes us happy one hundred percent because of that, because the world is made of colors”.

The future of architecture?

Some are more skeptical about these new trends simply because they understand that architecture, in some regions such as Latin America, has a greater debt in other ways.

Alejandro Csome is an architect, he has his own studio, and in addition, he is dedicated to communicating and disseminating architecture with an ATP approach and trying to get away a little "from the inbred production of architecture", on networks such as Twitter (@alejandrocsome), Instagram or including Twitch, where he is followed by thousands of people. “Neuro architecture for me is a marketing effort to try to sell architecture, basically because I already consider that architecture has to take care of all this aspect of how space is perceived. Today we are in a state of crisis because the most basic of architecture has not been resolved, which is that places are easy to use, comfortable, well ventilated, well lit and designed for the activity that is going to take place inside.”

Csome also explains that here what is generally done are either prefabricated houses or houses that do not have an architecture study in the space to be inhabited, therefore much less considerations such as the colors that are going to be chosen, the furniture that is going to be used, much less, to think about designs taking into account the needs of the human group. “Containers are usually designed in the abstract noun capacity of the word, not in relation to a real container but in what is going to be a container of life, and that's it. Argentina has a very large response capacity in terms of architectural tuition, but little economic access to it, which is why architecture generally ends up being relegated and the actors that begin to appear to supply the material need are people who are not immersed in the field of architecture; and if it is not studied, it is not produced and it is not done.”

Despite this, Csome points out the importance of psychology in the design of spaces, but emphasizes, "they do not prepare us in psychology to take these things into account in college, the client is a metaphorical figure", and reports that he himself suggested taking families with "real problems" to some university lectures so that students listen and design solutions based on this.

The reverse of this situation, on another continent, on the contrary, poses horizons that seem to be of the sci-fi genre. Laboratories such as the one at the University of Valencia, apart from collecting medical data, also perform data analysis using statistical and machine learning techniques, and add the use of immersive technologies or VR (virtual reality). “One of the main limitations when studying the design-emotional response relationship of the user is the difficulty of imagining (we cannot always evoke how we would feel when faced with certain design changes). NeuroArchitecture tries to circumvent this limitation by incorporating environmental simulation. Using virtual reality shown through immersive devices we can make users experience different design situations, and determine which are the most appropriate; something hardly viable in physical spaces. In addition, it allows scenarios to be simulated under controlled conditions, so that it is possible to alter a specific design attribute, without modifying the rest, and to test a large number of configurations”, concludes Millán.

Despite the differences, they all seem to agree on something: a fundamental mistake is to believe that the world of architecture is outside of us. “As we enter a space — the space immediately enters ourselves as well (our mind, comfort, sensitivity, etc.). So the experience between a space and a person is always an exchange”, concludes Knize.

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