Buildings and Wellbeing: Architecture for Health - Wellness Design Consultants
To be truly capable of enhancing human well-being, building design needs to change its approach towards optimising crucial parameters such as temperature and humidity, in a holistic way that supports human behaviour and health, both mental and physical. This includes adopting healthy building practices that improve indoor air quality and environmental design.
Based on the scientifically established facts, the purpose of this article is to outline the definition of health and wellness through healthy architecture, and to determine potential implications and opportunities for housing design, closely associated with, for example, poor indoor environment and air quality.
Health improving concept in architecture
The design and the making of our built environment and homes affect our health and well-being by making long-term implications on the quality of life.
Improving health, wealth and happiness is influential in revealing suitable behaviour - strongly influenced by the context of where we spend our time, sleep or grow and eat our food.
It has been pointed out that people can make better decisions automatically, non-coercively and more simply, through changing their choices in health and wellbeing architecture. The impact that architecture has on health is evident: it’s easier to make better decisions in a more healthy environment and constrain behaviours by making certain actions more difficult. This includes supporting the emotional wellbeing of occupants, which is crucial for overall mental health.
The importance of sustainability in architecture for indoor air quality and health
Sustainability integrates environmental concerns with creative ways to build interiors of materials non-harmful to the environment, promoting a sustainable built environment.
All the concerns based on energy efficiency, waste reduction, water supplies, the assessment of materials and recycling, the impact of transport on greenhouse gas emissions, green purchasing policies and more are dealt with in the basic sustainability questions, all which you can be provided with throw explanations from Biofilico.
We should treat all buildings as critical environments and Biofilico knows how to make possible their correcting. First of all, a holistic management solution is required to create healthy architecture and living environments for all tenants - with healthy air, water and materials.
Establishing controlled foundation for a comprehensive solution
Establishing an environment for health architecture with ventilation and controlled humidity within rooms is very important for indoor air quality and increasing amounts of particles of organic and non-organic compounds, humidity and CO2.
Comprehensive and healthy air solutions for filtration, UV technologies, cleaning protocols, humidity density and facility controlling strategies should work together for a more holistic approach and intelligent solutions. The main innovations concerning materials are greater use of wood, concrete and composites, that achieve a high level of thermal efficiency and solar energy glazing.
Architecture for health and wellness improvement
As we have pointed out, when it comes to wellness, establishing an environment for health architecture is a crucial factor and a bedrock for any further words about health. It’s easy to spot where the problem actually lies.
Did you ever feel dull or unusually tired after a meeting or simply after work? That’s because most offices and conference rooms do not provide enough fresh air, mostly because of the windows lacking. Prolonged exposure to such environments can cause tiredness, pain, and high blood pressure.
When that door opens, it literally feels like the wind breathes life back into the room. But, unexisting windows and wind flow actually has a much worse impact on our body than we can see or feel.
All the indoor spaces - where we work, teach and learn, play, eat, and even heal, have an outsized negative impact on our performance and well-being. Badly implemented architectural ideas affect our creativity, focus, and problem-solving ability, making us sick and putting in jeopardy our long-term future, dragging down profits in the process.
Long term benefits of healthy architecture
Biofilico’s goal is to improve the lives of all people, in all of the buildings of the future, everywhere and every day. By counselling and examining situations nowadays, we can discover how to optimize buildings for health using factors in the built environment that influence human health, wellbeing and productivity.
Poorly constructed buildings, bad waste materials, and unhealthy building materials lead to buildings affecting human health, from cognitive performance to the wide range of different diseases.
Whether people are healthy or not, is highly determined by the environment they live in. To a large extent, factors like where we live and the state of the environment, have considerable impacts on health - equally as genetics, income, education, our relationships with friends and family.
Cognitive benefits of wellbeing buildings
Adjusted ventilation rates, carbon dioxide levels, and the quantity of airborne VOCs (chemical compounds emitted by common objects such as desk chairs and whiteboards) have a huge impact on cognitive functioning and assessments like crisis response, decision making, and strategy.
Workers in green certified buildings, high-performing buildings show as much as 26 percent better cognitive functioning, have an increment in sleep and rest scores - all because of better lighting and optimal thermal conditions approved by LEED certification.
Architecture for physical and mental wellbeing - why design wellness oriented buildings
Buildings designed to make us happier and healthier can be costly. There is now a huge incentive for companies to invest in healthy architecture and wellness buildings, encouraging choice, movement and relaxation, controlling temperature, noise levels and air quality, adding breakout areas, ergonomic furniture and plants.
Open spaces within healthy architecture places encourage collaboration and increase understanding of the variety of employees’ personality types, such as introverts and extroverts. Housing is also another huge opportunity for wellbeing, mental wellbeing, and design.
The ascendance of architecture and health in the built environment
Architecture is an important contributor to mental and physical wellness in its own right. The relationship between architecture and health has historically received little attention, but recent work has changed this and established a more holistic awareness of the role of architecture in physical and mental health and physical and mental wellbeing.
Nature-based solutions are increasingly being integrated into architectural designs to harmonize the natural and built environments.
The science of wellness inside buildings is a relatively new area of inquiry, but architectural developments related to wellness provide a critical mass of evidence that led to the definition of key behaviours related to improved or decreased residence conditions. The most collected evidence supporting the assertion of behaviours resulted in an improvement in architecture and health are:
Connecting people - the quantity and quality of social connections and interactions with familiar people and strangers.
Keeping them active - demonstrates that physical activity reduces symptoms of mental and physical illnesses.
Being mindful - taking notice, paying attention and being aware of thoughts and feelings is a behaviour that reduces symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression.
The International Well Building Institute emphasizes the importance of creating healthy buildings that support the physical health and emotional wellbeing of their users.
Synthesizing scientific information, certification systems, new technologies, real estate trends and environmental changes into a cohesive strategy for your business, Biofilico creates unique places and interiors where people are most able to prosper and live long and happy lives.