CREJ - Building Dialogue - December 2017
Beauty in design intertwines with continually transforming market interests. Communities, and the building industry, refocus regularly, incorporating new opportunities and challenges facing local and global populations as well as emerging technologies and evolving aesthetic preferences. While the quest to create beauty in our environment remains constant, we repeatedly redefine our perception of it, along with how it’s achieved. For decades we debated definitions of “sustainable design,” never agreeing on the nuances. Most recently we transferred this focus to “health.” In this refinement lies a powerful opportunity for complex beauty: architecture designed to promote human health across all scales, from individual through community to global. Architecture for life. Growth of populations, cities and human demands are shaping our planet, recalibrating and redefining our relationship to it as quickly as it transforms. There is no limit to imaginative visions of how our earth will look, and support life, in decades to come. This change will be our legacy, and it is up to us to choose if it will be beautiful. How do we do this, choose beauty, support life? Human health for life. One pathway includes designing for human health, never losing sight of inextricable ties connecting scales. The only reasonable solution prioritizes all of them, considering every being impacted by a project, through direct experience of the architecture or direct experience of the global transformation that the architecture drives. A project’s impact extends beyond its occupants, or future generations, or people elsewhere in the world; it falls upon every living being: each, and all, alive today and in years to come. Carbon dioxide offers a simple example. Most often discussed as a greenhouse gas tied to global warming, impacts at the individual scale gained attention in 2014 when the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, SUNY Upstate Medical University and Syracuse University released their rigorously conducted “COGfx” study. Their research showed substantial declines in human cognitive performance as carbon dioxide levels increased within building interior spaces. No problem; we can easily remedy this through increased outdoor air ventilation, flushing carbon dioxide. But the problem gains significance when we consider that, for thousands of years, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide remained below 300 parts per million. Between 1958 – when the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration first tracked atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide in Mauna Loa – and 2016, mean levels rose from 315 to 403 ppm. They continue to climb, exponentially faster as populations grow and energy demands increase, toward levels now quantifiably known to impact human cognitive function. Higher-thinking capacity as well as productivity are threatened, potentially this century, possibly even within decades, worldwide. This is one poignant example of many. This year the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, representative of more than 50 percent of U.S. medical professionals, documented regionally specific individual health impacts resultant from climate change, observed through direct patient experience. Besides extreme weather events, they highlighted infections borne by pests, tainted water, foods and agriculture along with wildfires, air quality and extreme temperatures. All emerged through their practices as climate-related issues presently affecting a broad cross-section of our current population, their patients. So clearly, the health of any single group of individual building occupants cannot be considered without first examining the prerequisite consideration of how each project improves, or harms, the global environment that supports us all, and life itself.
Advancing opportunities. Impacts to individuals inspire action. They’re relatable, and tangible. We see this worldwide, as hundreds of communities react to individually impactful events by seeking solutions that support survival, transforming local market preferences. This is visible in a spreading interest in standards and certifications such as LEED and WELL. It’s also expressed through welcomed introduction of performance-based private financing incentives and support of tighter community development baseline requirements. Ultimately, it’s visible in the most affected and advanced cities and countries as a shared societal commitment to reshaping economic, urban and social structures. Market demand follows awareness: for higher-performance and uplifting solutions, aesthetically, environmentally and intellectually. Beautiful solutions. We as architects participate in this evolution, not only by reacting to what our clients directly request, but also by expanding conversations and knowledge. Not all beneficial technologies cost more; we are empowered to present optimized, integrated, creatively responsible design solutions. But what does this mean? The alignment of individual occupant health with the interests of global health offers an opportunity to change the discussion: Global impacts are individual; individual impacts are global. Occupant health, energy, water and waste considerations interconnect, and transcend scales, one project at a time. The new concept of beauty will need to address all these scales of impacts. The Colorado Health Foundation: One project at a time. In 2014 The Colorado Health Foundation assembled a team to define a new concept, Health Positive, and embody this in the design for its Denver headquarters. From this collaboration sprang a project envisioned to inspire occupants and visitors, and the surrounding neighborhood, to consider options daily that positively impact human wellness: mental, physical, spiritual. Through a balanced approach to resource conservation and accommodation for future generations, the design expresses and empowers the project’s holistic support of human health, and global life. This result aspires to bridge the scales of human health. Following principles of Health Positive design and targeting high levels of LEEDv4 and WELL certification, the team interwove strategies. This ranged from pairing the efficiency of a variable refrigerant flow mechanical system with selective glazing and structure for future roof photovoltaics to biophilic spatial continuity between inside and out, and healthful material selections. It included floor plates, layouts and glazed partitions for optimized daylighting; efficient and variable temperature artificial lighting; abundant, varied, low-water landscaping inside and out, including a central green wall; acoustical and indoor air quality optimization; and celebration of active design through highly visible, consciously crafted grand stairway, bike and fitness room elements. Members of The Colorado Health Foundation’s team embraced this; their reactions moved us. It is a humbling responsibility to contemplate beauty in the built environment as delivering health, and life. But that’s exactly what it can do. Medical impacts on patients, research and individually devastating extreme weather events render the effects on each of us of our collective alteration of the planet no longer abstract. They’re real and defined, making communication of the importance of considering this in every built project easier to convey than ever before. We as architects need to seize this opportunity and craft a new approach, create a new form of beauty that truly responds to these challenges and leads the way to an architecture that supports our very existence. Our Future Market. Knowledge and technological advancements develop as quickly as the global community changes, exemplifying the resilient promise of human ingenuity. We face a unique opportunity as an industry to open our minds, work together, and to consciously elevate our economies and communities one project, consideration and priority at a time. Through a complete and more broadly defined understanding of human health, we can help to shape a new interpretation of beauty, and a globally influential architecture for life. Christy.Collins@davispartnership.com