Understanding the links between mental health, architecture, and sustainability

By Sarah Gilmore

Architecture has long been concerned with its effect on its occupants: “how is what we design and build going to be used by its occupants? How is it going to affect them?” Throughout architectural history, this concern has manifested in a variety of ways: through control of space, through phenomenology, through social and cultural commentary, through art. What these all have in common is that these approaches, when applied through an architectural lens, are philosophical in nature. We’ve thought about how architecture affects us, we’ve postulated, we’ve written, we’ve built. What we are only beginning to delve into now is understanding these questions through a scientific lens.

My interest in the link between mental health and architecture began as an architecture undergrad being introduced to that foundational question, how does architecture affect us? As we learned about the greats in architectural history, I came across a famous Louis Kahn quote: “In a small room one does not say what one would in a large room”.  The implications of this statement have fueled a small obsession ever since, and I used my graduate thesis to think and learn about how to link our understandings in psychology about mental health and psychological well-being with architectural forms. I will share some general thoughts and connections I have made and give a curated reading list for those whose interest has been piqued. 

Urban-Rural Happiness Gradient From The Eudemonic City: Architectural Principles for Urban Well-Being by Sarah Gilmore. Made using 2012 census data, Stats Canada

Does architecture, in fact, affect our mental health?

Measuring happiness remains one of the more difficult aspects of this problem, but experts in psychology, sociology, and economics have a few ways to gauge ‘happiness’ and psychological well-being in both individuals and communities. For example, while life-satisfaction reports don’t tell us much on an individual scale, they can inform us on overall trends in larger communities when compared. The most recent census data in Canada tell us that we are experiencing what other countries have also confirmed: that people living in our cities are less happy than the people living in the corresponding surrounding rural areas. This tells us that there is some sort of environmental condition in cities that are impacting the health of people. Can we know exactly what it is – a social issue, an economic issue, a factor of the built environment itself? No, but we do know that all these things are interrelated and have an impact on each other. A fundament of architectural practice is the knowledge that the built environment can impact how people relate to each other. On a large scale it is not ridiculous to extrapolate that the large-scale built environment might impact the larger social scale, which in turn would impact community health, economic health, medical health etc. It’s a feedback loop system.  Two great reads that touch on cities in particular are Happy City by Charles Montgomery, and Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives by Sarah Williams Goldhagen.

ARBORICOLE The Inhabited Tree For Millennials, A Biophilic Project Focused Smart Building, Angers 2018, France By Vincent Callebaut Architectures in Paris.

How does (and how can) architecture affect our mental health?

Mental health and physical health are interrelated. One of the ways that architecture can impact our mental health is through more established ‘healthy building’ tenets – natural materials, sustainable energy practices, the encouragement of movement, etc.

Other ways that architecture can impact our mental health more directly involve some more nitty-gritty psychology tricks, particularly where the factors of psychological well-being are involved. We feel safer, and happier, in an environment that our brains understand and that give us autonomy and environmental mastery. This can be achieved in an infinite number of ways, but I’m particularly interested in emerging research that merges neuroscience and architecture to understand what decisions we make as designers can be the most impactful. Knowing that our brains are biophilic – meaning we process the world around us and are attracted to things we understand, i.e. the natural environment – informs us that choosing natural materials and mimicking natural forms and processes make people feel more comfortable and safe in a given space. We also know that our brains are wired for narrative and story-telling, so not just designing a space with sustainable building practices but ensuring that its future occupants are aware of the building’s story and goals further our relationships with those spaces and give them deeper meaning.

Some general reads on the impact of architecture on people include Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space by Jan Gehl, Places of the Heart by University of Waterloo’s Colin Ellard, and Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being by Esther M. Sternberg. A shorter, more technical read with an eye towards the biophilic is Cognitive Architecture by Ann Sussman and Justin B. Hollander.

SHoP Dunescape for MoMA PS1 2000

Moving Forward

Research and interest continue to broaden in scope when it comes to architecture and neuroscience. The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), related to the American Institute of Architects and the Salk Institute, continues to showcase and promote research into this growing field, holding a biennial conference at the Salk Institute. There is an increasing sense of urgency to understand how to build better cities in particular, with urban growth rates skyrocketing and more than half the world population predicted to be urban by 2050, and Toronto’s projected growth is no exception. Paired with climate crisis and housing crisis, understanding the relationship between neuroscience, sustainability and architecture seems more imperative than ever. While the desire to build better cities is as old as cities themselves, there seems to be a fundamental shift in attitude; rather than prescriptive, intellectualist, and some would say arrogant approaches to utopian living, we are now focusing on evidence-based design, empowering those most vulnerable in the urban environments, and collectivist problem solving, with no delusions that perfection exists.

Here is a final anthology-type book providing a great overview of the breadth of approaches, backgrounds and attitudes for those who find themselves wanting to dig deeper:

Mind in architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design by Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallassmaa.