Brains and Buildings

The latest offering from Wiley's series of books on sustainable design just arrived on my desk: Sustainable Healthcare Architecture by Robin Guenther and Gail Vittori. The book is wide-ranging, with plenty of case studies and essays from green building luminaries. Flipping through its pages, I came across an essay by Bob Berkebile, in which he mentions the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture. Apparently they've discovered a part of the brain that's devoted solely to processing the environment around us: "Recent research has identified a cortical region containing voxels, described by John Eberhard, former director of research for AIA, as collections of neurons that have the function of recognizing buildings. This part of the brain doesn't appear to exist for any other reason: researchers never find it active unless the body is reacting to its environment." (page 18) This might explain why we have such strong reactions to built spaces, which can create feelings of safety or danger, awe or disappointment, well-being or illness. Yet another reminder that green building is about more than just saving energy, water, and material resources. (The image above is of Patrick H. Dollard Health Center, part of our High Performance Buildings Database.)