Our environment is intimately linked to our physical and emotional health and well-being. We are currently living in an exciting period of reaction and rediscovery that questions how we, as humans, are part of ecosystems and that where and how we live must be intertwined with nature—and design and architecture can show us ways of rethinking how we shape and occupy the space around us to reconnect with the environment.
“The way our brains, our bodies, and human beings work—these all need to be connected to basic elements, whether it’s through daylight, fresh air, or fresh water,” says Loïc Angot, Lemay’s Practice Leader in Sustainability and key driver of its NET POSITIVE™ approach.
Echoing the words of Dr. François Reeves, Associate Clinical Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the Université de Montréal who studies correlations between the environment and heart health, Angot says “architects and urban designers can be seen as doctors for cities, ‘prescribing’ space that enhances quality of life.”
Just as practitioners of medicine work to remove blockages and heal the body, designers can provide cities with beneficial and regenerative solutions. With this social responsibility, they can transform space—from city streets and neighbourhoods to landscapes and living environments—through sustainable, human-centered designs, inclusion, active mobility, and citizen participation.
Healthy buildings make for healthy people
As climate change intensifies risks to our health and creating new ones, it’s never been more important to act through our living environments. This requires an eco-active design of our buildings, landscapes, and urban environments. Natural materials, natural ventilation, our choice of envelopes, and the integration of active systems that limit the use of expensive mechanical systems that have high environmental impacts—all of these and more present numerous and advantageous bioclimatic solutions both for the health of people who use them and the ecosystems surrounding them.
By bringing back living elements into our built environments with restores connections to nature and supporting richer biodiversity, we will have strategies to not only make our world a healthier place. We will also have created spaces where we feel healthier when combined with the biophilic benefits of natural lights, plants and sustainable materials such as wood, greater engagement with our space, improved moods and better concentration, and improved air quality.
Beyond these strategies ranging from eco-friendly materials to access to vegetation and natural light, space that is arranged and interconnected with nature can stimulate physical activity and social interaction. We’ve seen these positive effects in workplaces such as the head office of Nortera and the Phenix, where even the curated placement and design of features like stairs encourage movement and interaction. Salutogenic architecture is another interesting approach, as it can stimulate the mind and inspire pleasure, creativity and feelings of satisfaction through space design that encourages socialization, relaxation, collaboration, and in some cases encourage the use of sustainable transportation.
“In our processes of efficiency, our buildings can lose this ability to make us feel better than when we originally entered them,” explains Antoine Buisseret, design director and head of our Care+Design approach.
“What if we start from the idea that architecture can not only serve its purpose while providing us with a greater sense of happiness and well-being? This is how we can find a real connection between the natural world, the body, and the spirit. This approach can be applied just as much to care environment as it can to workplaces, learning environments, or where we live.”
“Furthermore, considering these goals, we cannot neglect ‘non-functional’ aspects,” he adds. “What about space we can be lost in? To dream in, to open other dimensions in our ways of living?”
Designs that benefit our health and well-being doesn’t solely need to look inward, either. We can design space to have outward benefits when it considers how a space impacts the communities around it. Public facilities, like gathering places during events, must be considered both in terms of their use and their footprint in the city: What will they look like when not busy? What will they mean to urban space then? These questions give purpose to avoiding resource waste while making these spaces more active and better adapted to people and their cities, turning them vectors of urban dynamism.
Take the Bellechasse Transport Centre for example: Its multi-level structure takes a citizen-focused design approach which conceals its fleets of electric and hybrid buses underground to reduce noise and visual pollution. On the surface, greenspaces blend harmoniously with the surrounding landscape to reduce its environmental impact and heat island effects, enriching biodiversity and encouraging pedestrian activity. By placing emphasis on people, it’s an architectural form that enhances and redesigns the urban context, offering a place to reclaim space through a new landmark of socialization and relaxation.
“These types of mutually beneficial designs between humans and the environment have a positive impact on our health and ability to recover, but they also impact us socially, or ability to learn, how we work, and so forth,” says Buisseret.
The building’s role as caregiver
While design’s benefits to health and well-being extend to all kinds of built environments, it’s a concept that finds foundation in healthcare environments. Intended to heal us and put us back on our feet, these places are an excellent example of the role that architecture can play in well-being and inclusion. If their designs do not allow them to support us as much as they heal us, then they’re not fulfilling their primary focus.
Like so many other structures, healthcare environments have been industrialized to become proverbial factories of treatment. They can instead take on far more beneficial forms that are better integrated into their urban environments and just as good for the health and well-being of patients as they are for their caregivers. Projects like the CHU de Québec’s Integrated Cancer Centre, centered around a large garden, show how healthcare can be anchored in spaces that go beyond the medical context. Green roofs, works of art inside and outside, openness to nature and daylight, ergonomic layouts—all of these elements contribute to rethinking care and creating an environment that both places the patient at the heart of its focus while healing and soothing users.
Realizing this in future projects, however, requires a new approach to design that questions our way of how best to meet the current and future needs of the healthcare sector: By integrating patients, researchers, and healthcare professionals in a transdisciplinary and future-oriented design process, we can ensure buildings support the improvement of their experiences within them.
These kinds of initiatives begin in the fostering of a design culture that corresponds to our needs now and to what will benefit us in the future—something that can happen by revisiting public policy around architecture and participatory design.
“There is an appetite for these changes to be implemented from healthcare specialists, but it needs to be catalyzed by designers and be a part of our planning,” says Loïc Angot. “We need to improve our methods to show the full potential of alternative solutions… these are investments that must go beyond immediate costs.”
Active architecture, not reactive architecture
Architecture and design may not be a panacea, but it is a critical tool in the improvement of both our well-being and that of the planet. We’ve seen how it can hold promise for all kinds of challenges, from the global concerns of climate change to daily concerns of sedentary lifestyles, improving our work-life balance, mental wellness, and generally making us healthier.
Our bodies and minds need an architecture of health and well-being as much as the planet does, and the pathway there comes down to shift in our design mindset, an embrace of environment, and to seek out solutions that truly and sustainably enrich how we live.
We’re connecting design expertise with healthcare communities through exploratory dialogue around how architecture can be a vehicle for innovation in care environments with a bottom-up, people-first approach: Learn more about Care+DesignTM.
