‹‹ Theory (ART) has been invented to capture that energy — it’s
called a ‘soft fascination’.” A city built of concrete and brick with no
greenery, he goes on to explain, is called a ‘hard fascination’, and
when we’re exposed to all the noise, heat and abject monotony that
atmosphere provokes, our brains and bodies are simply not ‘fed’.
“Whereas gardens have been shown to engender activity in the
brain — not the crescendo of energy you might get from a big light
show, but soothing, calming and restorative. It’s creative energy.”
When designing the interiors and surface treatments for the
RCH, Whittle applied these findings. “We studied how light filters
through trees, and the detail, even if it’s only a fine-grained one, of
how natural light hits a leaf and transforms it,” he says. “Soft
fascination is about layers of different hues that move at different
rates on a different scale. So all that complexity generates a type of
perception and a reaction. It’s about thinking of the neurological
effects of that light hitting your eyes and grazing your face, and
what that does to your emotional core.”
To translate the theory, the glass window screens at RCH are
screen-printed with patterns, turning the sunlight into an elaboration
of texture and colour. “So when the children are looking through the
window”, Whittle says, “they get the halo of green that you get when
you’re looking through a tree in a park”. When applying colour, the
architect eschewed the typical Disney primary colour blocks for
something far more intricate, taking inspiration from the eucalypt
flower. “If you look deep into the blossom,” Whittle explains, “you
get different grades of colour that come together to reinforce a sense
of saturation and echo more of the natural world.”
Whittle and his team also addressed what he calls the “coherence”
of the building — “this theory about knowing where you’re going in
your life” — by skewing the layout to the sun. “This allowed us to
wrap the whole building with gardens, but it also gave us a natural
clock within the building, so that the circadian rhythms and overall
perception of the time of day was stitched into the experience.”
Bates Smart won more than 35 national and international awards
for the RCH, including the 2012 World Health Building of the Year.W
e can thank neuroscientists like Fred ‘Rusty’
Gage, a US pioneer in the research behind
neurogenesis — or ‘brain plasticity’, the ability
to make new neurons throughout our lifespan
— for fanning the flames of the neuro-
architecture movement. A 2003 lecture to the American Institute
of Architects, in which Gage insisted that the time was nigh for
neuroscientists and architects to become better acquainted, led to
the foundation of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture
that year, and a slow but sure awareness shift globally.
Jan Golembiewski, an architect and neuroscientist who codirects
the Sydney-based practice Psychological Design, cites studies he’s
conducted as well as those by others that demonstrate how the brain
responds to, and can profoundly be shaped by, environmental
stimuli. “When you’re engaging consciously and actively with the
environment, you’re building neural mass in your frontal cortex,
which gives you more ability to inhibit the negative,” he asserts.
“It will protect you against anxiety, depression and psychosis.”
And he should know: a fundamental component of Golembiewski’s
practice is in health-care design, and one of his greatest goals is to
change what has become the conventional approach to mental
health and aged-care facilities — sterile, unwelcoming, unnerving
environments. “We like to design spaces not just for aged and
mentally ill people who live in them, but for the people who visit
them,” he says. He references the Basin View Masonic Village in
Nowra, NSW, an aged-care facility that features an integrated
aquaponics garden, where residents, carers and visitors alike cantend to fish, yabbies, flowers, fruit and vegetables. “It gives family
a means to get involved, and they can go home with a bunch of
carrots homegrown by their grandmother,” he says. “And it gives
that grandmother a feeling that her family isn’t just visiting
as a sacrifice to their own time. It creates meaningfulness in an
older person’s life.” And, as numerous studies have shown, having
a purpose in life promotes resilience and protects the brain.So how does all this trickle down to the level of the individual in
a home? Is the day coming soon that an architect can deliver a living
environment prescribed to our personal peccadillos and unique
neurological and molecular profiles?
Golembiewski says hell yeah. “I really believe in bespoke
architecture,” he says. “I believe in designing for the person.
Design speaks, and we need to make that language say all the right
things to make people feel happy, comforted and content within
themselves. This is not about us bloody architects saying, ‘Well
this is my signature style... ’ It’s about the person you’re doing it for,
because that person has an emotional life that you have to nurture
with that architecture.”
Whittle agrees; in fact, he has put this logic into practice for
a friend, a high-end engineer, who lives in Olinda in Victoria. “He
wanted a specific space in Melbourne to be designed just for him to
write his algorithms. He had no idea what he wanted, but I suggested
that what he loved about Olinda was the woodlands and the sense
of removal from the city. So I designed a log cabin in the middle
of Melbourne that effectively has two skins: the first skin, where you
walk through the façade of the building, and the inner skin, where
we’re able to filter out the noise and the energy of the surrounding
city. We created a purity and light in the space, a certain smell
and a sense of nature. And it works. He was so comfortable, his
production of algorithms went off the charts.”
Tapping into what is effectively a set of coordinates dictated by an
individual’s psychological traits, and creating spaces that resonate
within those coordinates, is the future, Whittle insists. Already, Bates
Smart is in the planning stages of incorporating virtual reality linked
to neuroimaging technology into the design process. The idea is to
track people’s behaviours and emotions as they walk through a space,
to get a feedback loop in real time. He also believes this approach
puts a whole new spin on how we will come to perceive sustainability.
“It’s about time we actually used our wisdom and intelligence to
design things that are good for us,” Whittle says. “We want to build
buildings to last — not just in terms of being robust, but because
they bring joy to people’s lives for the long-term and they work
for multiple occupiers. It’s to do with attaching wellness and
humanism to sustainability, and doing it holistically. That’s starting
to become absorbed within the world now as a concept, and I think
it’s about to take over.” VLGARDENS have been shown
to engender activity in the
brain — not the crescendo
of energy you might get from
a big light show, but soothing,
calming and restorative.
It’s CREATIVE energy. KRISTEN WHITTLE
38 vogueliving.com.auVLview