Ecological & Restorative Theory

For class, my classmate Ashley and I partnered up to discuss Ecological and Restorative Theory.  I was happy to present on the topic because I honestly didn’t know much about it.  I’d like to present some of the topics we presented to our class and what I found particularly interesting.

Despite the fact that we are facing increasing environmental problems, we continue to behave in ways that are damaging to our own health and to the planet.  It is argued by many that our disconnection with the natural world may be contributing to our planet’s destruction. Global warming, pollution, species extinction and other environmental problems do not just happen.  Arguments of Global Warming aside, the point is this: human beings release chemicals into the land, air, and water every minute of the day and most of us do it without any thought of possible consequences.

The fact that people do not always behave environmentally does not necessarily mean they are not concerned. Although many people are aware of and care about environmental problems, this just isn’t always reflected in their behavior.  In an effort to understand this discrepancy, psychologists have examined the…

• Motivation,
• Attitudes
• Values
• and Beliefs

…of why some people engage in environmentally responsible behavior and why others do not.

Arguments exist stating that humans possess an innate need to affiliate with other living things. The biophilia hypothesis attempts to explain the human desire to relate to the natural environment. Humans began living in cities, separated from the natural world, relatively late in our history.  It is considered unlikely that we have erased all the learning about nature’s value embedded in our biology.  Evidence of the biophilia hypothesis lies in the popularity of outdoor wilderness activities and our fondness for natural scenery. Despite this evident attraction, there is considerable variability in the extent to which individuals are drawn to nature.

The understanding of our interconnectedness with the earth and sense of inclusion in nature is often referred to as our ecological identity or ecological self.  The easiest way to explain this is that damage to the planet is seen as damage to the self.

The Importance of Nature

Benefits of nature date back centuries and crosses all cultures.  The use of nature as a healing mechanism has only recently been applied to the healthcare environment because healthcare is becoming much more patient centered.  Researchers have discovered that environmental features can play a significant role in health outcomes by:

• Reducing anxiety
• Lowering blood pressure
• Lessening pain
• Shortening hospital stays

Ecological restorative theory is an emerging study, so researchers are searching for sound and credible information that proves gardens as an efficient and cost effective way to improve health outcomes and patient satisfaction.  However, it is believed that nature helps health outcomes by providing restoration from stress.  Stress is typically an outcome itself and can affect other outcomes as well.

Unfortunately, stress is considered a major problem in healthcare.  Patients, visitors and staff can all suffer from stress, sometimes due to the physical environment itself.  Hospitals are usually thought of as uncomfortable and unpleasant, which can add additional stress.  How many of you feel that hospitals are unpleasant?  I’ll admit that I typically find the environment within a hospital uncomfortable and bland aesthetically.  Typically I’m overwhelmed by how dreary and dated the environment feels… and that only makes me want to get out of there as soon as possible!

Sources:

Dancoff, J. (2000) Healthy Seniors: Gardening for Health. Retrieved from <http://content.health.msn.com/content/article/1738.50891&gt;

Marcus, C. C., Barnes, M., & Ulrich, R. (1999). Effects of Gardens on Health Outcomes: Theory and Research. In Healing gardens. John Wiley and Sons.

Nisbet, Elizabeth K., John M. Zelenski, and Steven A. Murphy. “The Nature Relatedness Scale: Linking Individuals’ Connection With Nature to Environmental Concern and Behavior.” Environment and Behavior 41.5 (2008): 715-40. SAGE Publications. Web. <http://online.sagepub.com&gt;.

Zeisel, John. “Treatment Effects of Healing Gardens for Alzheimer’s: A Difficult Thing to Prove.” Edinburgh Garden Paper: 1-6. Print.

Filed under: Environment, Theory, Architecture, biophilia hypothesis, ecological theory, healing gardens, interior design, landscape design, restorative theory

Cultural Approaches to Environmental Design

What is culture?

Culture is a term used by social scientists to describe a people’s whole way of life.  To social scientists a people’s culture consists of all the ideas, objects, and ways of doing things created by the group.  Culture consists of learned ways of acting, feeling, and thinking, rather than biologically determined ways.

Cultural Studies of Space

Consider types of environments.  The examples used are usually of housing (in the broad sense of systems of settings for living, including neighborhoods, their urban spaces, other setting types, etc.).   This is because the role of culture there is particularly strong.  Moreover, a large number of these examples tend to be of traditional and vernacular where the role of culture is stronger still.  In this sense, these become model systems for studying culture-environment interaction.

But does culture play a potential role in other types of environments, i.e. the non-residential environment?  In the case of universities, airports, scientific laboratories or even office buildings, the role of culture may be minimal or even non-existent.  According to Amos Rapoport, this raises another issue.  If, for some reason, one wants non-residential environments to express cultural identity, what physical elements would do so?

In non-residential environments, culture plays less of an important role in design.  Whereas in residential environments, culture becomes increasingly more important as the environment becomes more intimate.

“Travel, for me, is an adventure,” Wolf says. “I like very primitive places, I love the sense of exploring cultures that are very different from ours. It’s a way that I have expanded my vision of design by experiencing and understanding how other people live and communicating with them. If you don’t know or you haven’t experienced something, it’s difficult to work with materials and items that have come from those places. It’s very foreign because you don’t feel the dirt, you don’t feel its origin. You have to be immersed  in the culture so you can add to your personality, your range of vision.”

There is another statement that interior designer Vicente Wolf made once about his inspiration for his interiors. He remarked that he wasn’t inspired by cities from all over the world, with globalization in place, he said, “they all look the same.”

Is it possible that culture is disappearing?  During class we discussed several reasons why and how this could be possible.  First,the modern architecture movement brought interiors and buildings that embraced the removal of ornament and detail in favor of a stark aesthetic.  My classmate, Ashley, says it really well in her journal entry:

“Color, a large communicator of culture was also removed, in place of white, which spoke of order and cleanliness. Culture was replaced with the International Style, a modern style of architecture which could be found anywhere, as it speaks of no particular culture or style, which it was said to transcend. Though this stark modern style did not take over, many elements of this style still exist today. It supplies somewhat of a blank canvas, appealing to all, as it speaks of none in particular; a removal of cultural identity.”

Second, we travel much more than we used to and are able to easily move from place to place.  As a result, cultures have begun to merge or blend together – a prime example of this is the United States of America long nicknamed “the melting pot” because of the many varieties of cultures that exist here.  However, some say that the USofA, in fact, has no culture.

Sources:

Vicente Wolf Quote found here.

Day, K. and Cohen, U. (2000, May) The Role of Culture in Designing Environments for People with Dementia: A Study of Russian Jewish Immigrants. Environment and Behavior, 23 (3), 361-400.

Pultar, M. (1997) A Structured Approach to Cultural Studies of Architectural Space.  In S.M. Unugur, O. Hacihasanoglu and H. Turgut, Eds. Culture and Space in the Home Environment: Critical Evaluations and New Paradigms. Istanbul: Istanbul Technical University, 27-32.

Rapoport, A. (2008, March) Some Further Thoughts on Culture and Environment. Archnet-IJAR, International Journal of Architectural Research (2) 1: 16-39.

Filed under: Theory, Architecture, culture, interior design, vicente wolf

Class Fieldtrip: Marcel Breuer Exhibit

Marcel  Breuer

I’ve, admittedly, been a fan of Marcel Breuer’s furniture designs for several years now.  So, imagine my delight when I learned that our class was to take a field trip to the Marcel Breuer exhibit at MODA! Finally, I was going to get to go!

The exhibit was small, but very interesting as it traced Breuer’s career evolution from a furniture and interior designer to an architect and called to attention his creativity in all three areas.  We are reminded of Marcel Breuer’s contribution to Modernist architecture with his bold experimentation with forms and materials, particularly tubular steel.  On display were many of his chairs, including the Wassily (pictured above).  I really enjoyed seeing his furniture designs up close and personal – in a setting where I could really study it for a few minutes without looking silly.

I’m not always a big fan of his buildings, particularly because I’m not huge on crystalline forms… but I am, however, one of the first 30 people on the petition to save his library from being torn down here in Atlanta.

[Image: Architectural Record]

Filed under: Field Trip, Architecture, Furniture Design, interior design, Marcel Breuer

The Hidden Program

The reading selection from “Restructuring the Hidden Program: Toward an Architecture of Social Change” by Murray Silverstein and Max Jacobson was an eye-opening read for me.  The ideas presented about the architectural program were new to me.  I thought I would share some of the more interesting points (for me) with you here:

• What is an architectural program? On the surface it is simply a list of spaces denoting specific rooms and outdoor spaces, with a gross size for each, sometimes a few key relationships between them, and an overall budget for the project.  Fundamentally, an architectural program, even a very simple one, is a social-physical form.  It’s like a rough skeleton – a million things stand between developing a program and finally bringing the buildings to life.

• According to Silverstein and Jacobson, the argument has been that if programs are so fundamental to the nature of buildings, then they should be developed carefully from the outset by teams that include architects and even specially trained programmers.  And what is more, since architecture nowadays is notoriously alienating to its users, it is just at this point, in the formulation of the program, that user needs should be recognized and made part of the program.

What I found particularly interesting is their observation that people are not simply disaffected with architecture as such; but that they are disaffected with the way of life that is sustained by Modern architecture.

• As professionals trying to grasp this situation, we find ourselves of two minds.  In part we believe that it all makes sense: if we set about to design a shopping center or office building or house project, a good job of programming is important.  And if this work includes the opportunity to study the users, their habits, and their needs, so much the better.  But at the same time, no matter how sophisticated the program, we often feel that the projects we work on do not make sense – that is, they are alienating, wrongly conceived, and/or socially reactionary.

• As professionals, we tend to avoid the analysis of hidden programs, in part because we feel we have no power to explore and act upon them.  It is not easy for an architect to go the roots of a building type, unravel the myths contained there, and still be employable.  It is far easier for a professional to accept hidden programs and go on to demonstrate his expertise with methods and styles that embellish and improve the form.

Silverstein and Jacobson state: “But in fact isn’t this the kind of work society should expect from professionals that seek to define themselves as environmentalists concerned with users?  In our journals we all agree that buildings play a powerful role in their social ecology of a culture; that their programs are drawn from the dominant values, myths, and laws.  But when we are faced with the disaffection of people at precisely this level, we tend to ignore our theories and quietly fall back upon the myth of buildings as purely physicaly objects and thereby obscure our  complicity with these deeper issues.”

From here the authors proceed to analyze the hidden program of a supermarket which is a truly interesting read, but I won’t discuss it in detail in this blog post.  For those who do not attend this class, I highly recommend checking it out.  If you’re interested, though, my classmate Heather talks about the supermarket here.

Sources:

Silverstein, M. and Jacobson M. (1978). Restructuring the hidden program: Toward an architecture of social change. In W. Preiser (Ed.), Facility Programming. Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross.

Weisman, G. (2001). The Place of People in Architectural Design.  In A. Pressman (Ed.), The Architect’s Portable Design Handbook: A guide to best practice. New York: McGrawhill. 158-170.

[Image: Nina Ex Interior Design Portfolio]

Filed under: Theory, Architecture, interior design, programming