Architecture's next big thing

Good Weekend, Fairfax Media

26 August 2017

Architecture’s hot topic is how to design buildings that make us feel better.
Cue indoor gardens, emotionally pleasing colour palettes, stairs in place of lifts -
even animal enclosures.

The emblem of the next big thing in global architecture is a flight of stairs. Rising from the lobby of Frasers Property's headquarters in Rhodes, cheek-to-suburban-cheek with Sydney's Olympic Park, this broad stairwell of palatial dimensions is softened by a suite of Mondrian-coloured couches – bold red, cream and yellow – cascading down its centre. Visitors and staff cross paths in this stepped atrium. They hang out on the groovy couches. There's really no choice, thanks to a slightly bossy design feature: the lifts are only for the disabled. For everyone else, the stairs are compulsory; the building, as a result, is one big step machine. The offices are designed on the principle that, as general manager Reini Otter explains, "the built environment can directly affect your health". 

Frasers' $9.8 million fit-out by Australian architects BVN, replete with 30 per cent sit-to-stand desks, daily fruit and vegetable deliveries, indoor plants and three-metre-high trees, gym, noise dampening and "eco-certified" furniture, is a shrine to the emerging school of "livability design". Livable buildings are the pivot from "now to next", as Carolinn Kuebler, a green building-accredited associate at global architecture and design firm Gensler, puts it.of BVN

"In the past five years or so, 'green' has moved from a planet-focused point of view to one that embraces the impact that the built environment and human activity have on both the planet and the people who live on it," she says. "Expect this shift to continue and accelerate exponentially as global awareness of this interdependency strengthens."

Green architecture has grown up. Its guiding metaphor is no longer the plant; it's the person.

The same design philosophies find a home in the new Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) design for Google's canopied Charleston East campus in Mountain View, California, now approved for construction. It will include a public park and plaza, walking trails, shops and "outdoor rooms". The building's canopy – a bit like a squashed bug bearing a sneaker imprint – is designed to regulate indoor climate, air quality and sound. On its website, BIG proclaims its allegiance to "a happy and focused Googler who can perform optimally while at work". 

The firm's spiel continues: "We think this starts with health and environmental quality: by allowing sunlight to peer through the smile-shaped clerestories [a design feature adapted from Gothic cathedrals] and by utilising natural materials … and soothing acoustics, we can ensure comfortable and efficient workstations."

Frasers Property's HQ is not the only building in Australia to reflect a belief in the capacity of light, colour, space and volume to enhance performance, help us feel better and perhaps even live longer. It's as if buildings designed under the livability principle have suddenly become snazzy trainers, energy drinks, yoga classes, Zen spaces, day spas, wholefood cafes and rooms with priceless views all in one.

Until recently, the movement was known as Salutogenic design, combining the name of the Latin goddess of health and safety, Salus, and the Greek word for origins, genesis. The hokey-sounding "wellbeing architecture" is also used, as is the tongue twister "evidence-based people-centric design". Reference is often also made to the "biophilic hypothesis" of US biologist E.O. Wilson, who proposes an "innate" human need for natural "affiliation".

The movement has a lot to offer institutions with a healing mission. It guided Cox Rayner Architects towards rethinking the experience of dentistry when designing its $120 million Oral Health Centre, located at the University of Queensland's Herston campus. The architects responded to the near-universal aversion to the bright lights, sharp instruments and antiseptic interior of white-on-white dentistry clinics. From the outside, the 30,000-square-metre facility with 230 public dental clinics is a nuanced fusion of white concrete, glass and wood. But it's the interior, where stone floors, timber panelling and natural ventilation lend a leisurely air to what is, after all, an appointment with a dentist's drill, that the building expresses its true purpose: anxiety reduction. 

"People do feel better and work better in these types of buildings," the firm's Brisbane director, Richard Coulson, tells Good Weekend. Design, in this case, has waged war with fear, and won. Space, light, colour and texture have combined to subdue the anxious mind. Buildings can be freaky, and they can be healthy: that's the livability principle in a nutshell.

The livability ideal has captured the imagination of another Brisbane architect, Brian Donovan, whose practice merged in 2013 with BVN. Livability, he declares, is "the holy grail of workplace design". Donovan finds expression of the ideal in landscaped terraces, gardens and natural ventilation. "Architecture," he says, "will never be the same again."

There are points of light in architect Kristen Whittle's eyes as he talks about his profession's next big thing. "All the isms of the last century – modernism, rationalism, postmodernism, brutalism – were in some sense about style, about architecture itself," says the director of architecture and design firm Bates Smart's Melbourne office. "But this," he gestures towards the jagged skyline from his sixth-floor office, "is about us. About humanity."

Why can’t architecture be as restorative to us as the sunset at a beach?

Whittle has been researching the connections between architecture and wellbeing for a decade. As lead architect for Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital redevelopment, named 2012 World Health Building of the Year, he studied the "evidence-based" approach pioneered by Roger Ulrich, architecture professor at Sweden's Chalmers University of Technology, for its emphasis on views of nature as sources of healing. Ulrich found patients with views of nature were released earlier than patients enclosed by walls, concluding "visual exposure to settings with trees has produced significant recovery from stress within five minutes, as indicated by changes in blood pressure and muscle tension". Other influences are University of Michigan environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, who stress the impact of environment, particularly light quality, on behaviour.

The children's hospital is a three-dimensional realisation of these scientific findings. Whittle resisted the temptation to erect a single tower and instead designed a cluster of low- and medium-rise buildings around a streetscape. The village-like atmosphere, Whittle says, is designed to "give a heart" to a stigmatised institution – to, in effect, de-institutionalise it.

Even at the level of the individual room, spaces have been created to give families and patients privacy. The sunshades are designed to "glow with colour when struck by the sun at certain angles", he says excitedly. The building provides 80 per cent of patients with parkland views and its northern orientation allows more natural light. There are cute features such as a two-storey reef aquarium, playgrounds, therapy gardens and a meerkat enclosure.

"Recent studies have shown links to architecture and health at a core natural biological level and, most recently, with the advent of the neuroscience industry in the US, the links between emotion and space have become visible and measurable," Whittle explains. "We are beginning to understand that the emotional impact of architecture can be measured. We can show that some spaces are bad for us and others are good for us and design accordingly."

The relationship between physical and mental environments, captured in the Chinese philosophy of feng shui, has long been intuited. The big change, Whittle believes, came when the white knights of science – psychology, genetics and neuroscience – rode in to help architecture and design remake itself in a biologically conscious world. Questions asked since man first crawled from a cave and began to look for better digs can be asked again. Only this time, they can be answered by science.

The 2014 Nobel Prize for Medicine, shared between researchers in Norway and Britain for their discovery of brain cells that sensitise us to place, space and direction, gave architecture's embrace of neuroscience an extra gloss of prestige. Central to this inter-disciplinary movement is work by American neurobiologist Fred Gage on neurogenesis, or brain renewal. Brain cells, which had previously been thought to die an inevitable death with age, have been shown to change, revive and renew themselves in response to environmental stimulus.

Addressing the American Institute of Architects in 2003, Professor Gage, who runs a laboratory at the Salk Institute in San Diego, delivered what he called a "straightforward message" to architects: "Neuroscience has reached a degree of understanding about the brain and how it is influenced by the environment such that we might be of help to architects in designing environments that assist us in our ability to function within those environments."

America's Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture was founded that year, and the search for solid evidence of the way good design improves the brain began in earnest. However the field, described to me by an Australian designer as "a space just now being created", is nebulous, its tangible expressions few and far apart. In a report earlier this year, the US Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the "application of neuroscience to architecture remains in its infancy. No one has yet laid out all of the features necessary to design a building with direct roots in brain science, although architects certainly plan buildings with features meant to promote wellbeing". It went on to predict, nevertheless, that it would eventually be possible for neuroscience and cognitive science to inform design with rigour.

"In the last couple of years, scientists have begun to accumulate data on how our brains process buildings and navigate spaces, by monitoring brain activity or even using virtual reality environments," the report continued. "Although data thus far is preliminary, such collaborations could help architects judge designs and fashion better ones."

The National Academy quoted Professor Thomas Albright, a vision scientist at the Salk Institute. "How do you build a space that optimises learning in young children?" he asks. "How do you build a hospital that optimises healing? How do you build a work environment that optimises efficiency? The hope is that neuroscience can provide some of the answers."

Urbanism, by definition, involves a divorce from nature. No matter how green a city, it will never be the country. On the other hand, says Philip Goad, professor of architecture at Melbourne University, architects and designers have long been preoccupied with the ideal of "living or immersing oneself in nature" as "a sort of antidote to the perceived evils and health dangers, moral and physical, of the city". He cites the urge to flee to so-called "garden suburbs" in the late 19th century.

"Walter Burley Griffin conceived Canberra as a great democratic 'garden city' and spoke constantly of 'building with nature' as a necessary act of human symbiosis," says Goad. "Even arch-modernist architect Le Corbusier proposed roof gardens to capture the horizon and open undercrofts to houses and buildings so that landscape and nature might venture in – wishful thinking in most cases.

"But there were many architects who succeeded in inviting gardens and nature almost completely inside their buildings. Robin Boyd's own house in South Yarra [designed in the late 1950s] has a central courtyard garden that is the largest 'living room' in the house. In the Featherston House in Ivanhoe [1969], Boyd's clients Grant and Mary Featherston lived literally in a garden with living spaces on floating timber platforms and a translucent roof, with an internal sloping garden passing beneath."

The roots of the livability movement are so deep that it looks, at times, like a perennial preoccupation. The Greeks and Romans aimed to create harmony in their temple designs inspired by the symmetry they saw in the human body, an idea visualised by Leonardo da Vinci in his Vitruvian Man; architecture, for the ancients, was petrified nature. The best-known modern example of nature incorporated into architecture is Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, a 1935 holiday home in rural Pennsylvania built above, and cantilevered over, a waterfall.

Another great example is in Eureka Springs, Arkansas: a remarkable chapel built of glass, steel and Ozark timber. The Thorncrown Chapel, a weightless fretwork of beams vaulting from the dense mountain woods, represents a key link in the chain running from Lloyd Wright to contemporary design inspired by nature. Completed in 1980 by an apprentice of Wright's, E. Fay Jones, it was built of elements no larger than two people could carry through the woods by hand. It might not be particularly livable, though it is definitely loveable: Thorncrown is a pin-up building for biophilia design.

But while nature is important, it's only one part of the livability movement. Whittle places equal weight on the "social" and "natural" features of livability. "Why can't our cities be as beautiful as nature and parks?" he asks. "Why can't architecture be as restorative to us as the sunset at a beach?" Good design, he believes, should encourage social connection as well as recuperative communing with nature. There is no better example of this ideal than his children's hospital built around a street-like plan.

The livability movement has now been translated into the bureaucratic language of specifications and criteria. The Washington-based International WELL Building Institute has developed an industry standard for new buildings, interiors and renovations. To earn a WELL certificate, a building must meet standards of water, light and air quality, together with fussier features like comfort and fitness, both physical and mental. It includes a nutritional category, aimed at promoting healthy food and well-designed eating spaces. The certification process blends the perennial – since when was light quality not important? – and the zeitgeisty.

Describing itself as "the first building standard to focus exclusively on the health and wellness of the people in buildings", WELL claims to have 480 projects worldwide applying for certification. Meeting WELL's exacting standards in Australia are 36 projects, including the Frasers HQ at Rhodes. A 52-metre-high timber tower at 25 King Street, Brisbane, designed by Bates Smart for global engineering firm Aurecon and touted as the largest timber building in the world by area, is also seeking WELL accreditation. The project director, Bates Smart's Philip Vivian, describes his "plyscraper", slated for completion in 2018, as "a site-specific and innovative tall building that connects with nature". The natural connection is achieved largely through the use of timber construction, with laminated timber columns replacing concrete and steel, and timber interiors that recall the tongue-and-groove Queenslander.

Julie Bernhardt's interest in the impact of buildings on the mind and body begins with a Churchillian maxim: "We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us." The neuroscience professor at Melbourne's Florey Institute began thinking deeply about these issues in 2012, when a fellowship took her to Sweden, Spain, Canada and the US to explore health design. "Patients and families have reported that going outdoors into green space to manage stress and get relief from the noise, smells and otherness of hospitals can be a game-changer," she says. "The challenge for researchers is to contribute to knowledge about the impact of these and other features on a person's biology and recovery so we can help architects and designers make the best decisions about our built environment. Advances in technology, such as virtual reality, will help research efforts."

Liminal 360, a Melbourne-based virtual reality company working at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology and technology, has quite literally been looking into the connection between emotion and environment. The firm's managing director, Nick Busietta, a psychology graduate and former IT lawyer, uses virtual reality to simulate the experience of proposed buildings and environments. "This allows architects to conduct user testing to work out how a particular design performs before key decisions have been made during the design development process."

On the day I visit Kristen Whittle, he hands me a VR headset and invites me to take a ride. Tilting my head, I sense the finely filtered light pouring through an atrium, designed to evoke the play of sunlight through eucalypts. I peer into rooms. Around corners. Observe bustle in the foyer. When a virtual waiter approaches me in the virtual restaurant bearing a virtual sandwich, my non-virtual mouth waters. If someone offered me a leather sofa and dimmed the lights I would doubtless fall asleep. As I take the headset off and return to planet Melbourne, Whittle explains I've just been immersed in a building likely to be completed in 2022: the Bates Smart-designed Australian Embassy in Washington.

Busietta claims the information from VR trials can help predict how people will behave in certain environments – how they feel, where they look, where they go, and the decisions they will likely make.

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California, was founded by the inventor of the first successful polio vaccination, Jonas Salk. And it was Salk who gifted architects with a story to help explain, even before neuroscience came to their aid, the deep connection between mind and milieu. The story goes like this: before he successfully trialled a vaccine for polio, Salk retreated to the Italian town of Assisi. He'd been working 16-hour days for two years. He'd even thought of quitting research.

But then Assisi, a harmonious warren of medieval stone towers and cloisters that sweeps down the hillside towards the great 13th-century basilica of Saint Francis, worked its magic. 

The story has been often retold; it's easy to find on the web. Fearing it might be apocryphal, I approach Fred Gage of the Salk Institute and US architect Alison Whitelaw, both of whom confirm it. Whitelaw heard the story from a colleague who, she tells me, got it directly from Salk, who "told the story of his intellectual breakthrough, that he attributed it to the architectural environment he experienced in Assisi, and that led to his discovery".

If architecture can jump-start the synapses, or at least spur a mind as fine as Salk's towards a life-saving invention, it can also calm the nerves and offer comfort. This was the finding of a 2015 global report by Human Spaces, which describes itself as an "online space dedicated to biophilic design and the exploration of how the built environment affects our health and wellbeing". The report found, not surprisingly, that a third of 7600 respondents in 16 nations, including Australia, would consider the quality of office design when deciding whether or not to work for a company. But most office workers don't have the luxury of choice. They spend their working days – their lives – in dark, dreck, poorly designed offices and homes more biophobic than biophilic. The Human Spaces report, for example, revealed only 42 per cent of employees had living – as opposed to plastic – plants in the workplace, while 47 per cent said they had no natural light.

Whether livability design really is truly and dramatically new, or whether it is architectural mutton dressed as lamb, matters little. The movement may simply be reminding us of something we've forgotten, prodding us with the authority of science, and even a touch of pseudo science, to recall the twin guides of man and nature. If that results in buildings, workplaces, homes and institutions in which people can be happy, stress-free, healthy, fit, creative, smart, energetic and well-nourished, then who can complain? Nobody. Except, perhaps, the manufacturers of lifts – soon to be replaced with stairs.*