(no subject)
Healthful habitats are good business
- By Carol Lloyd, Special to SF Gate
Friday, July 21, 2006
Since the rise of airtight modern construction in the 1970s and '80s, the idea that a building can make you sick has become accepted as one potential side effect of bad design. In tract homes with off-gassing carpets or offices with malfunctioning mechanized ventilation or schoolrooms laden with asbestos, many of us learned the hard way that the buildings we occupy can take a nasty toll on our well-being.
But can buildings also make us better?
This question, of course, underpins the original impulse toward architecture. From the early European church designers' idea that vaulted ceilings induce higher thinking to architectural philosopher Christopher Alexander's theory that organically designed buildings make us happier, ambitious building design has always assumed that the link between built form and human being goes far beyond mere functionality.
But after decades of developers analyzing every dime to maximize cost efficiency, the planet has become littered with ugly, soulless structures. More specifically, since the energy crisis of the 1970s, bottom-line building has given birth to the following architectural scourges: the windowless elementary school, the suffocating office park, the claustrophobic hospital. Daylight, views and nature have often been relegated to the world of high-end residential design or the executive's corner suite.
Now architect David Hobstetter and engineer Alisdair McGregor have created a research-based presentation that aims to change these trends in commercial design. Armed with data from a wide array of medical and energy studies, they argue that many of the design features we now consider luxuries -- views, abundant natural light, greenery -- can have a measurable effect on our health, intelligence and even productivity.
"We always tell clients, 'You can build a cheaper building,'" explains McGregor, lead mechanical engineer with Arup Engineering. "The question is whether you want to."
Hobstetter, a commercial architect with San Francisco-based megafirm KMD Architects, has long been an advocate for incorporating daylighting and other sustainable building methods into his buildings. Built 15 years ago, his twin-towered Oakland Federal Building pioneered ideas about light and views that have now gained currency. Since then, he's worked on a number of projects that incorporate these ideas, including the Jie Fang Daily News headquarters in Shanghai and the County Government Center in San Luis Obispo.
But, Hobstetter says, the majority of developers and investors still need a lot of educating. "There is a small but growing understanding that sustainable buildings lease out more quickly and at a higher rental rate," he says, because green building is now considered fashionable, and many tenants are willing to pay more for sustainable design. But the powerful positive effects of daylighting, nature and views are not widely enough known.
The studies make a strong argument that developers should approach their work in more holistic terms. A 2003 study on office workers, funded by the California Energy Commission, found that the higher the exposure to daylight, the higher the level of concentration and short-term recall.
A 1999 CEC study produced similar findings in schoolrooms: The children enjoying the highest levels of daylight performed 7 to 18 percent higher on standardized tests than the children in classrooms with the least natural light.
Even within a single school, research showed that abundant natural light could have a radically positive effect on student learning. In San Juan Capistrano, students in classrooms with the most natural light progressed 20 percent faster on math tests and 26 percent faster on reading tests over the course of a year than those in classrooms with the least light. Higher levels of natural light have even been shown to increase sales in retail areas by 8 to 30 percent.
Even stimulating views -- widely argued to be distracting for students and workers alike -- seem to have a positive effect on performance. A 2003 CEC study of the Fresno school district found that complex window views -- with greenery or people and distant landscapes -- supported better learning results.
Similarly, a study of the effects of views at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District's customer service call center found that better views were consistently associated with better performance. Workers enjoying the best possible views processed calls 7 to 12 percent faster than those with no views. Better views have also been associated with better health conditions: In one study, computer programmers with views spent 15 percent more time on their primary task, while those without views spent 15 percent more time chatting on the phone or to one another.
"Over the life of the building all these upgrades pay for themselves by making the occupants healthier and smarter," says Hobstetter, adding that building construction, operation and energy costs typically amount to only 10 percent of a business's total expenses. The remaining 90 percent consists of employee salaries. For this reason, designing buildings that keep workers focused and healthy should be regard as a necessity, not as an amenity. "The increase in productivity, that's the hidden treasure."
Unfortunately, many projects are structured as "triple net leases" -- where the tenant businesses are on the hook for the energy and operating costs -- and many developers won't care about how their buildings influence their occupants or their tenants' bottom line.
The effects of daylight and views on the body's recovery time are even more surprising. A 2005 medical study from University of Pittsburgh found that patients in sunny rooms perceived far less pain than patients in dim rooms, translating into an average 21 percent reduction in analgesic medication. This confirmed the results of a 1984 hospital study published in Science, which found that post-operative patients with a view of vegetation took far fewer painkillers and recovered dramatically faster than patients who looked out on a concrete wall.
Ironically, the vision of bringing the outdoors inside, an aesthetic movement pioneered by Sunset Magazine and the early California architects, is proving to be far more than a groovy lifestyle choice. Utopian design, it turns out, has scientific teeth.
Once deprecated as merely aesthetic, daylight and greenery are being incorporated into the growing field of sustainability and green building. Natural light, if correctly designed, can save on energy, and interior greenery can clean the air, thereby reducing the need for ventilation. In the past, green-building proponents were hard pressed to monetize the value of their work. But now studies suggest that energy efficiency, health and beauty shouldn't be regarded as competing elements but as parts of an integrated whole.
"It's the connection between sustainability and brain/body function and productivity," says Hobstetter. "That's the holy grail."
For many of us, such findings make intuitive sense. Who doesn't feel better in rooms with natural light and, say, a view of the forest? But for the bean counters in commercial or governmental development, only hard evidence like will help send "the cheap building equals better business" formula to the scrap heap for good.
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Carol Lloyd is currently at work on a book about Bay Area real estate. She teaches a class on buying your first home in the Bay Area, and another class based on her best-selling career counseling book for creative people, "Creating a Life Worth Living." For more information, email her at surreal@sfgate.com.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2006/07/21/carollloyd.DTL
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Ashtoreth the other day about office spaces and their effect on desireability of position. Thinking about it now, the office I work in has a fair amount of natural light (lots of big windows around the outside walls), and even more in the reception area. Plus, a small jungle's worth of plants and a huge salt water fishtank. The boss has a thing about Feng Shui, so there are also a large number of mirrors and interesting crystals tucked around the office. The immediatly visible effect is that they spread the light from the windows throughout the office, so even those of us in cube-land get to enjoy it.
All in all, it's a nice office to work in.
Certainly makes that morning commute a little easier ; )
~M