Venetian Letter

Natasha Reid is founder of MATTER SPACE SOUL, a progressive spatial design lab working at the intersection of architecture, urban design, art and the human sciences, such as environmental psychology and neuroscience. Prioritising human experience, emotion, empathy and equity, her “Compassionate Places” design method focuses on holistically addressing the human dimension of the built environment to better support people’s wellbeing. She often speaks at academic and industry conferences on innovation towards more human places and addressing pressing societal needs. She is an advocate for the power of design to create change that matters for people.

Natalia Olszewska: I’m really intrigued by the name of your studio, and that’s actually where I’d like to begin. Your studio’s name includes the word soul, which suggests an interest in the mind and deeper human experience. I’d love to explore that. How does an architect come to focus on the concept of soul? What do you mean by emphasizing this aspect in your work as an architect and designer?

Natasha Reid: Yes, it took me a while to come up with the name of my practice—Matter Space Soul.

One of the reasons I left traditional architectural practice and started working independently was to explore different disciplines and perspectives on space. About twelve years ago, I felt that the industry lacked a deep consideration of the human dimension in design. Even though I was working for an amazing, award-winning firm, I felt constrained by the wider industry’s approach.

Dr Jenna Mikus is the Founder and Managing Partner of the Eudae Group—a design consultancy based in the US, UK, and Australia. As an advocate for balancing industry acumen with academic rigor, Dr Mikus blends art with science, quantitative analysis with qualitative exploration, and creativity with pragmatism. 

She is recognized as an Honorary Fellow with the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Wellbeing Science, a Visiting Fellow with QUT’s Centre for Decent Work & Industry, a Senior Fellow with the Centre for Conscious Design, a Research Advisor for the International WELL Building Institute, and the Founder of the Harvard University-affiliated Human Flourishing Network’s Flourishing by Design special interest group.

Michal: One interesting thing about how you described yourself is that you started as an artsy engineer, right?

Jenna: Yes, I have always been what I call an artsy or artistic engineer. As an only child, I joke that my parents lived vicariously through me, immersing me in arts and sciences from a young age. I started playing classical piano, dancing, and singing seriously at the ages of three and four. I enjoyed it—it was all that I knew.

In school, I loved learning. I’ve always been curious and took to art, science, and math equally. I started understanding different career paths, and a neighbor who was an engineer suggested I explore engineering. I was about 10 at the time, and that idea stuck with me.

When it came time to choose colleges, I looked at engineering and architecture programs. The school I ultimately chose offered a scholarship but didn’t have an architecture program, so I pursued mechanical engineering. I saw it as a marketable foundation I could build on. While there, I explored art history and minored in business, curating an experience as close to architecture as I could.

Nour Tawil, an architect and scientist specializing in the intersection of architecture, psychology, and neuroscience. She was part of the inaugural “Neuroscience applied to Architectural Design” program at IUAV University in Venice and pursued her Ph.D. at the “Center for Environmental Neuroscience” at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, where she continues to work as a post-doctoral researcher. Her research delves into the impact of architecture on the brain, striving to integrate scientific insights into architectural and urban practices to advance human-centric, evidence-based design approaches.

Natalia Olszewska: You’re an architect with a solid grounding in neuroscience. A few years ago, you embarked on a journey to add neuroscience to your professional background—not just through courses or self-education, but by studying in Venice and pursuing a PhD at Max Planck in Berlin. So, I think you’re the right person to answer this: Why do architects need neuroscience?

Nour Tawil: Architecture has traditionally been a discipline focused on creating spaces that promote wellness and comfort, often relying on intuition. The word “architecture” itself combines the ideas of principle and technique, or technology. Its goal has always been to merge technological advancements with principles that create healthy environments for humans.

Today, with increasing urbanization, growing mental health concerns worldwide, and challenges like climate change, we need new approaches to designing spaces that enhance human wellness. After the Industrial Revolution, the focus on wellness largely disappeared from design. Architecture became more functional, and often prioritized aesthetics or monumental design over placing humans at the center of the process.

Sarah is an architect, writer and educator. Her books, Architecture is a Verb (2021), with Juhani Pallasmaa (2015) and Nesting (2011) have been the first works to explicitly engage the dialogue between architecture and the embodied cognitive sciences and have been translated into five languages so far. She served as President of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture Board of Governors, is an Adjunct Professor in Media Design and Architecture at Aalborg University in Denmark, teaches and is on the Scientific Board of NAAD, Neuroscience Applied to Architectural Design at IUAV, Venice, is an Advisory Board Member of ANFA and co-founder of the Italian Chapter. 

She served as the Architecture Chair of Moving Boundaries Collaborative and recently co-wrote and produced the award-winning documentary short film What Design Can Do with Sarah Williams Goldhagen. On her new podcast, Situated, she hosts conversations with multidisciplinary thinkers exploring how our surroundings shape us.

Michal: What’s your story? How do architecture and philosophy connect?

Sarah: I grew up in Minnesota. As a child, I was always drawing— sketching houses—and building forts in the woods with sticks and boats to float on the lake. It was beautiful. Back then, it was normal to wander freely and only come home when you were hungry. Eventually, the forest was cut down, and all that remained was a paved basketball court. I was upset and never went back there.

In college, I studied philosophy because it came naturally to me. I also loved art and drew constantly, but pursuing art as a career didn’t seem practical. Philosophy felt like the better option. However, I quickly realized the frustrating aspect of philosophy: we only talked about ideas but never acted on them. As someone who loves making and doing, this was disappointing.

After graduating, I traveled the world and spent a year in India, where I had an epiphany—I should become an architect. I began researching architecture schools. When I visited UC Berkeley, I was struck by how unattractive the architecture building was. It was depressing to think such a space was meant to inspire future architects.

William Browning, BED Colorado University, MSRED MIT, Hon. AIA, LEED AP, is the Managing Partner in Terrapin Bright Green, an environmental strategies research and consulting firm. Browning’s clients include Disney, New Songdo City, Lucasfilm, Google, Marriott, Bank of America, Salesforce, Interface, JP Morgan Chase, CoStar Group, the Inn of the Anasazi, the White House, and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Village. Browning was a founding member of the USGBC Board of Directors.

He is co-author of Greening the Building and the Bottom Line (1994), The Economics of Biophilia (2012, 2023 2nd Ed), 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design (2014, 2024 10th Anniversary ED), Human Spaces 2.0 Biophilic Design in Hospitality (2017) and Nature Inside, A Biophilic Design Guide (2020). His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Elle, Popular Science, and in segments by NPR, Reuters, CNN, and PBS.

Michal Matlon: How did you start your practice of biophilic design?

Bill Browning: I started a green building practice at Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado in 1991. We were collecting case studies on early green buildings and seeing surprising gains in worker productivity. The literature at the time suggested these outcomes shouldn’t be attributed to the building itself, but rather to management changes. Yet, we kept finding more and more evidence that the buildings themselves were making a significant difference in people’s lives.

Eventually, at the end of 1994, we published a paper called Greening the Building, the Bottom Line. It featured eight case studies showing increased worker productivity in various building types. 

Following that, we joined a group that secured funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to examine the effects of moving 700 factory workers from a windowless box to a new, daylit facility surrounded by a restored prairie landscape. This was designed by William McDonough for the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller. One of the researchers brought in to guide the process and set up the hypothesis was environmental psychologist Judy Heerwagen, a pioneer in the field of biophilia.

Doug Gordon is a co-host of the popular podcast The War on Cars. He is also a writer, public speaker, TV producer, safe streets advocate and passionate believer in cities for people. He has written for The Guardian, The New Republic, Salon, Curbed, Jalopnik, The New York Daily News and Streetsblog.

As a TV producer with credits for PBS, ABC, Discovery, History, Travel and NatGeo, Doug knows how to tell a good story. Through his communications consulting business, Brooklyn Spoke Media, he has advised nonprofits and mobility companies on communications strategies that make the case for safer, smarter streets. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife Leora and their two children.

Natalia Olszewska: Welcome, Doug! Please tell us a little bit about what led you to start The War on Cars podcast.

Doug Gordon: My background is in television production, and I have worked on many different shows, mostly documentaries, with a focus on science and history. I was always interested in cities and safe streets, so I also did a lot of advocacy work in my neighborhood, pushing for bike lanes and bike parking.

Over time, I did more of that and started writing about it because my background in television often involved explaining complicated issues to general audiences. This skill translated well into my activism.

A lot of the issues we’re interested in are complex, and regular people don’t always understand them and can’t be expected to. So I started doing a lot of writing and explaining about how things work and how they could work better.