Search

(1) Background: Housing has long been recognized as an essential determinant of health. Our sense of home goes beyond physical shelter and is associated with personal or collective connections with spaces and places. However, modern architecture has gradually lost its connections between people and places; (2) Methods: We examined traditional Indigenous architecture and how it can be utilized in contemporary settings to restore connections to promote the environment, health, and well-being. (3) Results: We found that traditional Indigenous building structures may be the best manifestation of the Indigenous interconnected and holistic worldviews in North America, containing thousands of years of knowledge and wisdom about the land and the connection between humans and the environment, which is the foundation of reciprocal well-being; (4) Conclusions: Learning from the traditional structures, we proposed that modern architects should consider the past, present, and future in every endeavor and design and to utilize traditional knowledge as a crucial source of inspiration in creating works that are beneficial for both current and future generations by taking collectivism, health and well-being, and the environment into consideration in designs.

Virtual architecture has been increasingly relied on to evaluate the health impacts of physical architecture. In this health research, exposure to virtual architecture has been used as a proxy for exposure to physical architecture. Despite the growing body of research on the health implications of physical architecture, there is a paucity of research examining the long-term health impacts of prolonged exposure to virtual architecture. In response, this paper considers: what can proxy studies, which use virtual architecture to assess the physiological response to physical architecture, tell us about the impact of extended exposure to virtual architecture on human health? The paper goes on to suggest that the applicability of these findings to virtual architecture may be limited by certain confounding variables when virtual architecture is experienced for a prolonged period of time. This paper explores the potential impact of two of these confounding variables: multisensory integration and gravitational perception. This paper advises that these confounding variables are unique to extended virtual architecture exposure and may not be captured by proxy studies that aim to capture the impact of physical architecture on human health through acute exposure to virtual architecture. While proxy studies may be suitable for measuring some aspects of the impact of both physical and virtual architecture on human health, this paper argues that they may be insufficient to fully capture the unintended consequences of extended exposure to virtual architecture on human health. Therefore, in the face of the increasing use of virtual architectural environments, the author calls for the establishment of a subfield of neuroarchitectural health research that empirically examines the physiological impacts of extended exposure to virtual architecture in its own right.

Background: Lack of physical activity (PA) is the fourth risk factor for all-cause mortality. Regular PA reduces noncommunicable disease (NCD) and mortality risk. The built environment (BE) is a determinant of spontaneous daily PA. Professionals who plan and build the BE therefore affect public health. We tested the hypothesis of a lack of formal pregraduate training about associations between the BE, PA and health in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design academic degree programs (DPs) in Switzerland., Methods: We reached out to all DPs in Switzerland to ask if and how these associations are taught. For those declaring to teach the topic, the program syllabus and course material were inspected., Results and Discussion: For 30 out of 33 identified programs, information for the analysis was obtained. A total of 18 declared teaching the BE, PA and health associations, but this could be confirmed for only 5 after verifying the course content. Teaching principles of building PA-promoting BE represents an underutilized potential for public health promotion., Conclusions: There is a need to introduce formal learning objectives in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design DPs in Switzerland on the associations between BE, PA and health. It is likely that similar needs exist in other countries.

The emergence of a collective identity, a complex social and psychological process, may be linked to a specific place and a particular urban layout. Architecture demarcates interior and exterior spaces that not only frame our relationships but can also generate a mirror image of the internal world. The authors examine relevant contributions from the sparse psychoanalytic literature on this subject, to support their hypothesis that changes to a city's landscape, design, or architecture, when wholeheartedly embraced by its citizens, can serve to forge a new collective identity that helps to deal with absence, pain, and loss. They present the city of Bilbao, Spain, as a case study. This once thriving industrial city had collapsed into economic ruin, rife with social conflict, but since the 1990s, in an urban renewal, has emerged as a unique tourist destination. It has become a modern art and cultural center, symbolized by its most famous piece of contemporary architecture.

The design of the built environment plays an important role as a determinant of health. As a society, we are spending an increasing proportion of our time indoors and now spend over 80% of our life inside, so the design of buildings can greatly impact on human health. Accordingly, architecture health indices (AHIs) are used to evidence the effects on human health associated with the design of buildings. AHIs provide quantitative and empirical data upon which architects, clients, users and other stakeholders might monitor and evaluate the healthiness (or otherwise) of architectural design. A systematic literature review was conducted to reveal the current state of knowledge, reveal gaps, explore potential usage and highlight best practice in this area. Whilst there are a number of different health indicators for the built/urban environments more generally, the scope of this review is limited to the scale of a building and specifically those aspects within the remit of a professional architect. In order to examine the range and characteristics of AHIs currently in use, this review explored three electronic bibliographic databases from January 2008 to January 2019. A two-stage selection was undertaken and screening against eligibility criteria checklist carried out. From 15 included studies, 127 documents were identified, and these included 101 AHI. A sample of the most commonly used AHIs was then analysed at an item level. The review reveals that most AHIs are limited to measuring communicable diseases that directly affect physical health through e.g. air quality or water quality. There are very few indicators focusing on factors affecting mental and social health; given the increase in mental and social health problems, greater focus on AHIs related to these health issues should be included. Furthermore, the research reveals an absence of AHIs that address non-communicable diseases (NCDs). As the majority of all poor health outcomes globally are now related to NCDs, and many are associated with the design of the built environment, there is an urgent need to address this situation.

Traditionally, architectural practice has been dominated by the eye/sight. In recent decades, though, architects and designers have increasingly started to consider the other senses, namely sound, touch (including proprioception, kinesthesis, and the vestibular sense), smell, and on rare occasions, even taste in their work. As yet, there has been little recognition of the growing understanding of the multisensory nature of the human mind that has emerged from the field of cognitive neuroscience research. This review therefore provides a summary of the role of the human senses in architectural design practice, both when considered individually and, more importantly, when studied collectively. For it is only by recognizing the fundamentally multisensory nature of perception that one can really hope to explain a number of surprising crossmodal environmental or atmospheric interactions, such as between lighting colour and thermal comfort and between sound and the perceived safety of public space. At the same time, however, the contemporary focus on synaesthetic design needs to be reframed in terms of the crossmodal correspondences and multisensory integration, at least if the most is to be made of multisensory interactions and synergies that have been uncovered in recent years. Looking to the future, the hope is that architectural design practice will increasingly incorporate our growing understanding of the human senses, and how they influence one another. Such a multisensory approach will hopefully lead to the development of buildings and urban spaces that do a better job of promoting our social, cognitive, and emotional development, rather than hindering it, as has too often been the case previously.

Background and Aim: Important public health improvements have been achieved over the past decades, but new challenges are emerging and progress cannot be taken for granted. Urban settlements host most of the global population, but they are also sources of several threats. The aim of the paper is to investigate the role of architects and planners in contributing to overcome these critical health challenges and propose strategic actions for collaboration with the public health workforce., Methods: Taking global trends and public health challenges as starting point, a scoping literature review has been conducted to illustrate the possible synergies that architecture and public health workforce should exploit to support population health improvement and tackle key public health challenges., Results: The built environment affects climate change and public health through the use of resources, site location, and green spaces. In architecture curricula, limited space is devoted to health and vice versa. There is an urgent need for recognition of the benefits of collaboration and cross-fertilisation between public health and planning workforce from local to global levels., Conclusion: Public health is evolving from a bio-medical to a socio-anthropological approach and architects/planners have fundamental roles; further collaboration, research and training are needed.

Background: Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurological condition characterized by the development of daily disabling symptoms. Although the architecture and design of a PD patient's environment can hinder or facilitate full participation in daily activities, their putative role in the management of these patients has received little attention to date., Objective: We conducted a systematic review to evaluate the evidence of architectural and design features in the management of people with PD., Methods: An electronic database search of observational and experimental studies was conducted in MEDLINE and Embase from inception to May 2020, with two independent reviewers identifying the studies. Falls, fear of falling, postural instability, gait impairment/disability, and functional mobility were our outcomes of interest., Results: Thirty-six studies were included, among which nineteen were observational and seventeen were experimental studies (overall participants = 2,965). Pavement characteristics, notably unstable surfaces and level differences, were found to be a major cause of falling. Ground-based obstacles and confined/narrowed spaces were found to disturb gait, increase postural instability, and decrease functional mobility. Housing type did not appear to increase risk of falling, nor to significantly explain concerns about falling., Conclusion: Findings suggest a need to adjust architectural features of the surrounding space to ensure appropriate care and provide a safe environment to PD patients. More evidence about the impact of such modifications on PD outcomes is needed.

The paper fills the gap between the design and the actuality of how buildings, and its surroundings, urban design, and the built environment influence its occupants' behavior and interactions. We assess how the built environments can be influenced by humans and their control, both physical and symbolically, of the urban landscapes. In this regard, our paper merges symbolic interactionism, sense of community, and architectural design to aid our understanding of the man-environment relationship. Specifically, we assess qualitative data on Ekbatan Residential Complex in Tehran. We use Ekbatan as a case study to see how a sense of community among residents reflects both physical features of the complex and the symbolic meaning attached to these features by residents and those living outside the community. We conclude by suggesting that combining the interests of urban sociologist, community psychology, and architects via symbolic interactionist concepts may be a fruitful avenue for studying factors affecting sense of community and larger urban processes., (© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

The search for general common principles that unify disciplines is a longstanding challenge for interdisciplinary research. Architecture has always been an interdisciplinary pursuit, combining engineering, art and culture. The rise of biomimetic architecture adds to the interdisciplinary span. We discuss the similarities and differences among human and animal societies in how architecture influences their collective behaviour. We argue that the emergence of a fully biomimetic architecture involves breaking down what we call 'pernicious dualities' that have permeated our discourse for decades, artificial divisions between species, between organism and environment, between genotype and phenotype, and in the case of architecture, the supposed duality between the built environment and its builders. We suggest that niche construction theory may serve as a starting point for unifying our thinking across disciplines, taxa and spatial scales.This article is part of the theme issue 'Interdisciplinary approaches for uncovering the impacts of architecture on collective behaviour'., (© 2018 The Authors.)

The Neolithic revolution--the transition of our species from hunter and gatherer to cultivator--began approximately 14,000 years ago and is essentially complete for macroscopic food. Humans remain largely pre-Neolithic in our relationship with microbes but starting with the gut we continue our hundred-year project of approaching the ability to assess and cultivate benign microbiomes in our bodies. Buildings are analogous to the body and it is time to ask what it means to cultivate benign microbiomes in our built environment. A critical distinction is that we have not found, or invented, niches in buildings where healthful microbial metabolism occurs and/or could be cultivated. Key events affecting the health and healthfulness of buildings such as a hurricane leading to a flood or a burst pipe occur only rarely and unpredictably. The cause may be transient but the effects can be long lasting and, e.g., for moisture damage, cumulative. Non-invasive "building tomography" could find moisture and "sentinel microbes" could record the integral of transient growth. "Seed" microbes are metabolically inert cells able to grow when conditions allow. All microbes and their residue present actinic molecules including immunological epitopes (molecular shapes). The fascinating hygiene and microbial biodiversity hypotheses propose that a healthy immune system requires exposure to a set of microbial epitopes that is rich in diversity. A particular conjecture is that measures of the richness of diversity derived from microbiome next-generation sequencing (NGS) can be mechanistically coupled to--rather than merely correlated with some measures of--human health. These hypotheses and conjectures inspire workers and funders but an alternative is also consequent to the first Neolithic revolution: That the genetic uniformity of contemporary foods may also decrease human exposure to molecular biodiversity in a heath-relevant manner. Understanding the consequences--including the unintended consequences of the first Neolithic revolution--will inform and help us benignly implement the second--the microbial--Neolithic revolution.

At the Rural Studio--an off-campus program of Auburn University--architectural students use scavenged and donated materials to create innovative houses and other buildings for poor, rural, primarily African American communities. Materials such as hay bales and old tires are recycled to create full-blown modern architecture, which also fulfills community needs. (SV)

Describes an adobe conservation project used with seventh- and eighth-grade students at the Zuni Pueblo (New Mexico). States that the project motivates students as they participate in experiential learning. Addresses the objectives in a traditional architecture curriculum and contends that the adobe conservation project demonstrates the place of traditional architecture in the curriculum. (CMK)

Provides a case for teaching children about local architecture. Describes a specific example called the Kentucky Project as a humanist approach to built environmental education that enabled middle and high school students to study their architectural heritage through a program of videos and related teaching materials. (CMK)

Describes an exercise in which students analyze architectural barriers in campus buildings to understand that people with disabilities are excluded from everyday social interaction. States that through the active learning exercise students link their experiential understanding of environmental obstacles with theories and concepts about conformity and non-conformity. (CMK)

Focuses on making the distinction between aesthetics and pragmatics within the realm of design education, particularly architecture. States that aesthetics is typically associated with beauty, while pragmatics is a way to demonstrate that a frank approach has been utilized. (CMK)

Describes the use of puppet theater in an Alaskan elementary school focusing on the design and implementation of a play on the history of Alaska. Reports that the play's focus was on the change in architectural structures as a means to explore events that transformed Alaska. Provides recommendations for a similar project. (CMK)

Reports on a class project that used donated materials to build a replica of the George Washington Bridge. The children read books related to bridges and created "vehicles" out of milk cartons for the bridge crossing. They also created stories for their vehicles that were transcribed by older students. (MJP)

Project offers grades 3-8 students hands-on design practice creating built environments to solve a society-based architectural problem. Students plan buildings, draw floor plans, and make scale models of the structures that are then used in related interdisciplinary activities. (Author)

Historians, architectural historians, folklorists, archaeologists, geographers, and preservationists are engaged in documenting and interpreting the material record of human occupation through systematic study of the built environment. "Vernacular architecture" as an object-oriented approach to cultural and historic research is discussed in relation to the University of Utah study of the Bridge House Basque hotel in Paradise Valley, Nevada. (SAS)

A Native Canadian architect talks about his building projects, how they were influenced by his cultural traditions and the teachings and advice of the Elders, the spiritual nature of creativity, giving a building power by designing it as a living being, and linking tradition with the latest technological tools. (SV)

Considers women's history in the western United States using the historic places of the National Park system as its basis. The National Park Service has created three categories for historic sites: places that focus on women's history; places that include women's history; and places that surprise us with women's history. (MJP)