Last fall I had been in England exploring some ultra modern holiday homes included in a press trip for any project known as Living Architecture. While happily snapping photographs of those contemporary structures, one lady stated in my experience: “Make certain you will find individuals the photos architecture is all about people.” Which was Jane Wernick, among the project’s structural engineers, who later explained she’d edited a whole book about how exactly architecture affects our psyche.
Building Happiness: Architecture to help you Smile, is an accumulation of essays by architects, artists, policy advisors, engineers along with other big thinkers that discusses whether the way you design our structures and environments can have an effect on how happy we’re feeling?
The book’s contributors are members of Building Futures, the Royal Institute of British Architects’ think tank established to explore where and how individuals will be living as well as in what kinds of structures and environments within the next 20 to half a century.
So, are we able to construct happiness?
Although some in book take problem with the assertion that there’s an immediate outcomes of architecture along with a good mood, most agree so good architectural design enables for positive relationships and social interaction between people and structures, and also the spaces they inhabit.
The requirement for physical comforts – light, seem and temperature – along with the requirement for culture and community were also noted as vital elements in how architecture can promote happiness.
The dislike for locations that make us feel alienated and unmanageable, would be a recurring theme one of the essays, so that as Wernick notes, “The very best places are individuals which let’s feel we’re in charge, and that provide good social interaction and also the chance to become one with nature.”
Additionally, Wernick requested individuals with a penchant for structures and architecture to explain the locations that make sure they are happy. Journalist Kirsty Wark’s happy place would be a Glasgow museum sculptor Antony Gormley chose their own studio as his happy place and architect Richard Rogers feels happy within the courtyard space at London’s River Café restaurant. (Rogers states three things in existence bring him happiness – food, sex and architecture.)
And Wernick’s happy place? It’s one out of which she’d a hands within the design, the Xstrata Treetop walkway in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, that provides a lengthy stroll through deciduous trees at 18 metres over the ground.
Building Happiness draws no solid conclusions about whether architecture directly affects a person’s happiness, but it will make you smile which is “mood for thought” for individuals who design, plan and make our favourite spaces.
My philosophy of writing, and all sorts of art, echoes Gaboury’s belief about architecture: “The essence of architecture is space structured for people, however the ultimate goal is symbolic, metaphoric or spiritual, like every other talent. The main difference with architecture is it links art using the practical.”
I have faith that effective writing, too, can link the artistic using the practical.
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