Architecture for wellbeing – why should we care?

At Grow Capital, we are committed to designful developments. Meaning, we use design at every step of our development process, to maximise the best ‘human’ outcomes for our owner/occupiers. This in turn, provides greater returns for our investors.

Yes, it may bit of a different approach for a developer to take. To be concerned with optimal urban liveability that is. Heck, we even instruct our architects to talk to real people at the outset of our projects, to discover how they want to live and thrive in our spaces.

We believe that the more we do to grow wellbeing and sustainability through well designed developments, the more we will do to grow prosperity for our investor and end-buyer clients. Indeed the community. In other words, the better the outcomes of living, the stronger our brand. It’s a win win.

That’s why we love this movement:

ARCHITECTURE FOR WELL-BEING AND HEALTH.

Yes, it’s a ‘thing’, a movement, a paradigm shift if you like and it’s big in Britain.

The World Health Organisation now defines health not as the absence of ill-health but as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being”. Think about this in terms of your living environment….

We all know how it feels to be in spaces which maximise natural light, that have an outlook to nature, that feel comfortable and are easy to live in. It feels uplifting. It’s good for the soul.

In contrast, step into a space that does not have a good orientation to sun, that is darker, feels smaller and has no outlook to nature – (or community) and it can feel depressing. This is the epitomy of architecture for wellbeing as we see it. Design affects headspace!

To truly enhance human well-being, building design needs to move beyond optimising single parameters such as temperature and humidity, to more holistic approaches that take their cues in health-supporting human behaviours and good social and mental wellbeing.

In a home designed to grow wellbeing, the emphasis will be on the presence of well-being rather than the absence of ill health. Although, it goes without saying that the fundamentals of good thermal dynamics, ventilation and temperature control must be in place as a foundation of good health. (To this end, we build above code and look to sustainable technologies to assist healthy living and actually also save money for occupier in the long-term.)

The evidence
There is an established body of expertise related to the study of physical health with increasing quantitative evidence, but research into well-being in the built environment is a relatively recent and largely qualitative area of investigation that is nevertheless beginning to reveal consistent and widely accepted findings. These findings are interpreted here http://thedaylightsite.com/architecture-for-well-being-and-health/ in terms of architectural design.

Distilled down to themes
This same article by a Professor of Sustainable Design from Cambridge*, highlights rules of thumb for designers, which we at Grow have set as a mandate for our architects. These are the key themes and seem to be fast becoming the benchmark for global best-practice integration of wellbeing in architecture:

• NEIGHBOURHOOD AND NATURE
• MOVING AND ACCESS
• EAT SOCIALLY
• INDOOR ENVIRONMENT QUALITY

At Grow, our architects are given a mandate to embrace wellbeing through design across these four pillars.

Watch this wellbeing space!

* Koen Steemers is Professor of Sustainable Design and has been Head of the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. His current work deals with the architectural and urban implications of environmental issues ranging from energy use to human comfort. Alongside his academic work, Koen Steemers is a director of CH&W Design and of Cambridge Architectural Research Limited.