Insights
Aug 31, 2022 _ insights
Buildings as Medicine
Founded on the idea that the places we live, work, and play have the power to determine our health outcomes, “Architects as Healers, Buildings as Medicine” is a global collective of architects, interior designers, planners, healthcare practitioners, artists, and educators devoted to designing places that enhance wellbeing and collective health outcomes.
Megan Mazzocco of Spring Architecture and I partnered to share insights on the built environment’s impact on health outcomes at two recent conferences: NeoCon 2022 in Chicago, Illinois, and the Midwest Sustainability Summit in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Opportunities to design for health occur at every scale: pristine versus poor air quality, walkable versus drivable cities, hospitals with nature views versus a brick wall—all are examples of how the environment enhances or detracts from quality of life and longevity. To ignore these as design opportunities in the built environment is to ignore the public health crisis bubbling up in the form of obesity, chronic stress, inflammatory disease, and mental health decline.
Because human evolution has not caught up to modern convenience, shelter has depreciated from human sanctuary to a comorbidity. Our hunter-gatherer brains crave nature 24/7 (a term called biophilia). We’re hard-wired for constant vigilance and negative bias (that stick is a snake!). Additionally, human bodies are designed to walk anywhere from nine to 12 miles a day. When modern life has us indoors 90% of the time without opportunities for regular movement, it leads to elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which causes chronic inflammation that contributes to poor health outcomes and disease.
We aim to equip the profession with evidence-based design strategies grounded in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and behavioral economics so architects have the power to hack the human experience for positive health outcomes in the built environment. This is how buildings can become medicine.
To learn more about what we shared, click through our Midwest Regional Sustainability Summit presentation here: Buildings as Medicine
Angela Mazzi, FAIA, FACHA, EDAC is a principal and medical planner in GBBN’s healthcare market. Harnessing studies on human psychology, research on our biological need for nature, and experience with Lean strategies, Angela creates exceptional environments that help patients heal and empower professionals to deliver exemplary care.
