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Articles

Chromatic Impact: How color can improve health and comfort in design

Private house in Italy. Color project by Laura Sangiorgi. Project by Stefano Lucini. Image: Barbara Tili.

Originally published in Builder Polska magazine no. 10/2024.

The relationship between color and health is profound and multifaceted, encompassing psychological, physiological, and cultural dimensions. Frank Mahnke, a renowned expert in color psychology, emphasizes that color’s influence extends beyond mere aesthetics; as a form of energy created by light, it directly impacts our mind and bodily functions. 

Color Perception

Color can alter cortical activity, affecting higher-level brain processes like perception, memory, and decision-making. It also influences the autonomic nervous system (ANS), which regulates involuntary bodily functions such as heart rate, digestion, and respiratory rate, and can affect hormonal balance. These effects highlight that our reactions to color are holistic, influencing us on both psychological and physiological levels.

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Interviews

Nour Tawil: People are interested in the connection between neuroscience and architecture.

Nour Tawil.

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.

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Interviews

Sarah Robinson: Architecture must reconnect with human emotions, perception, and the body.

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.

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Articles

Rethinking Design Materials: A shift towards healthier spaces

Image: Engin Akyurt

Originally published in Builder Polska no.11/2024.

From chronic discomfort to severe health risks, our buildings may be doing us more harm than good. Since the discovery of Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) in the 1970s, the link between indoor environments and our health has become impossible to ignore. The time to rethink our materials is now.

Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) and the Evolution of Healthy Materials


Since the 1970s, the term Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) has been used to describe health issues that seem to be linked to the internal environments of buildings, especially in offices. Initially, the mechanism behind symptoms such as eye irritation, headaches, and general discomfort wasn’t well understood.

However, research soon revealed that the primary culprit was the quality of indoor air, not only from external pollution but also from the out-gassing of building materials and furnishings.

This phenomenon has become a critical concern, pushing the scientific community to investigate the harmful chemicals in common building products.

Today, we know that many compounds, like waterproofing agents, antimicrobials, plasticizers, and flame retardants, can cause more harm than the benefits they are supposed to offer.

One emerging area of concern is nanotechnology. While these materials offer significant performance improvements, they can become hazardous when they come into direct contact with people, especially when they break down and release micro-particles into the air.

These tiny particles, often smaller than cellular barriers, can penetrate deep into our bodies and settle there permanently. This is particularly alarming in the case of PBTs (Persistent, Bioaccumulative, and Toxic chemicals), a class of substances that don’t dissolve in the environment and accumulate in our tissues.

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Interviews

Bill Browning: The buildings people love have a strong biophilic component

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.

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Articles

Sonic Architecture: Shaping Positive Soundscapes in Buildings

In architecture, the sound of a building is usually overshadowed by its visual appearance. It might even be an afterthought. Yet, as researchers learn more about our relationship with sound, the need for “sonic architecture” is becoming more evident. And with smart building technology, it’s become an accessible tool for designers too.

Sound impacts us physiologically and psychologically in ways that are just as profound as other architectural considerations like lighting, spatial layout or temperature––if not even more so.

For designers looking to create human-centric and scientifically led buildings, sonic architecture is an exciting opportunity to put research into practice and improve people’s experiences in a multitude of ways.

The World is Sound

There’s a fascinating book by German journalist Joachim-Ernst Berendt called The World is Sound. The book itself is about musical cultures around the world, but the title sums up just why sound is so important: Sound is omnipresent. It affects us 24 hours a day. Even when we sleep, our brains listen out for sonic cues about our surroundings.

As human evolved, our ears were (and still are) important survival tools, feeding us information that might be the difference between life and death. So, we’ve evolved to respond very quickly and powerfully to sound. We hear things even when we can’t see them and we use sound to make sense of physical spaces––which makes it a particularly important consideration in the built environment.

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Book Reviews

Book Review: Constructing Health by Tye Farrow

Tye Farrow, a renowned Canadian architect, began exploring the relationship between architecture and its effects on people’s health early in his career. In an interview for the Venetian Letter published last year, the architect revealed how this interest has shaped his professional journey. Now, he shares his extensive knowledge and professional insights in his newly published book.

Published in May, Farrow’s “Constructing Health. How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind’s Health: An Exploration of Generous Architecture, Through the Neurological, Psychological, and Emotional Benefits of Enriched Environments” is a profound and essential read for anyone interested in the intersection of design and health. 

This book meticulously examines how our built environments can actively foster health and well-being. As someone with a background in medicine and working at the intersection of neuroscience and architecture, I found Farrow’s insights both enlightening and actionable, providing a comprehensive understanding of how intentional design can enhance our mental, physical, and emotional well-being.

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Interviews

Doug Gordon: Streets are not just for cars. They belong to all of us.

Doug Gordon. Image: Archive of Doug Gordon.

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.

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Research Briefs

Research Brief: How Ceilings Affect Our Feelings

Image: John Towner

Virtual reality has become an important part of our lives. Designers, for example, now regularly create virtual reality spaces to test options with potential users of a place to be developed. All of us, regardless of profession, have probably spent some time in virtual spaces, either for fun or for work.

In a recent study, Han and colleagues from Stanford University investigated how ceiling height and floor area in immersive virtual reality environments influence the thoughts and behaviors, particularly the social interactions, of people who visit them. Their study is particularly noteworthy because of the length of time over which the data was collected.

It is reasonable to assume that the core of the Han team’s findings can be extrapolated to physical-world environments; the research team itself notes the consistency of human experience in the physical world and analogous virtual spaces.

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Book Reviews

Book Review: Places of the Heart by Colin Ellard

Colin Ellard, Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life.

In this review, I delve into ‘Spaces of the Heart. The Psychogeography of Everyday Life’ by Colin Ellard. The book, which is very close to my professional interests, belongs to the canon of popular science literature and is dedicated to the exploration of how buildings and urban spaces, that is the “scenery” in which our daily lives take place, affect our brains and bodies.

In discussing this topic, Colin Ellard takes a historical-evolutionary perspective, using scientific research to explain how the natural and built environments have influenced humans over the centuries, and how they have shaped our responses to both real and virtual spaces.

Colin Ellard is well equipped to analyze such complex issues. He is a world-renowned cognitive neuroscientist working at the intersection of urban design and experimental psychology, and in his daily work he uses an arsenal of tools to gain insight into how the occupants of the buildings and cities he studies respond to the built environment features.