Architecture and the Science of the Senses | Stefan Behling | TEDxGoodenoughCollege

You, as an architect, have an incredible opportunity to change people's lives, that is one of the great side effects of this job. We can really make a difference. The other side of the coin is a pretty big responsibility because whatever we do exists for quite a long time. time and then the next complication in this is we can't actually make any decisions we can only be the advocate and try to get you the customers to do something we don't decide anything at the end of the day it's the customer so today I'm going to try to convince you that there is a problem that you should be aware of.

I think it's fascinating to realize that we share 96% of our DNA with him and if you then look at the things he enjoys it, I'm doing fine, I can die, that too I like a jacuzzi called if the jacuzzi is perfect for me he seems like him I like him, so it makes sense if you then think about him going into a lot of our buildings, you start to think Well, maybe some of our buildings would be really uncomfortable for him and he wouldn't find it as pleasant if you then look at the food when I I was a child, this was paradise.

I would have loved to have this type of food all day and in silence. I probably did a little bit. Too much nowadays there is good food, there is bad food, there is junk food and there is healthy food. Jamie Oliver and many other heroes have taught us to understand that there are good things and bad things right now, although we humans seem to have a pretty bad understanding. What is actually a good environment? What is a good internal environment for us and what is a bad environment for us? If you ask the children, show them many images of landscapes.

Children from all over the world under 10 years old choose the savannah. Again, you say. Well that's kind of a continuation of the monkey story, but it shows that there are some things that human beings like and that are good for them. I would say that the fabric stimulates your

senses

adequately and then there are other things that are not so good. This year I did studies to study central deprivation, they took a beautiful white room, they air conditioned it perfectly, the perfect light levels put people in it, they were gloves and they realized that the students after 24 hours began to show the first signs. of hallucinations and after 48 hours they basically broke down and collapsed.

Sensory deprivation is as bad for the brain as lack of stimulation is for the muscles. Everyone knows the phenomenon of having a cast and then your muscles atrophy and basically disappear the same thing in very simplistic terms happens to your brain if you don't stimulate it it will actually change plasticity and shrink to fight the fact that your brain creates hallucinations if you were still living in the country if you were working on the farm like this. Gentleman, all this talk would be irrelevant, but as everyone knows, more than 50% of the world's population now lives in cities and the most terrible thing about this is that they spend, like American citizens, 87% of their time indoors, even that would be Not the worst problem of all problems, but the problem is actually artificial environments in the last century, starting in the 30s, they had a big peak around World War II, the box factory was invented black, create a big box, you don't need any. windows, I'll give you artificial light and then you'll pump in air conditioning to keep everyone alive and let them produce planes.

Machines. You can do whatever you want in these buildings. They are super cheap and extremely flexible. You can even stack them. on top of each other and create an office building, you can have multiple levels of these factory floors as long as you keep them nice and sealed, don't let anything in or out and just pump up your air conditioning, the truth is that these buildings To create the most bland environments possible, they are basically the equivalent of the clean room that I showed you a few minutes earlier, you can actually argue that these buildings are nothing more than submarines, completely sealed artificial environments and the military studied submarines because where The one problem they had was that the crews suffered hallucinations because they obviously had a century of deprivation.

The crew members in the car when they got to shore had high levels of accidents because their vision disappeared because they were not using long distance vision when returning to the submarine and the office. The buildings, many towers that you see, are actually built like submarines, they are completely sealed and although a man or a woman would be this close to the glass and on the other side of the glass there is a beautiful fresh air of a day like this you don't can get, air comes in from the top of the building or somewhere from the bottom of the building is sucked into a mechanical room, the fresh air is then mixed, air that everyone has been using all day was used and It is then pumped through long pipes until it finally reaches you.

These pipes are either clean or not, but since this whole system is very energy intensive, buildings consume about forty percent of the world's energy, so these machines are actually a big part of the energy. global warming and damage to the environment so imagine you don't need the machine you turn off the machine every minute you turn it off you are actually saving energy so my argument is that you are creating something that is pretty bad in the next topic is that this energy, these environments are set by a man or a woman who is the facility manager and everyone gets the same thing and looking at them all now, I mean it's interesting, yes, I've flown, we all have different lives before Let's get into this conference today, you're all different, your physiology, your cycle is different, so assuming anyone can decide what you want to have all day, it's so strange that you would never do it. accept that how one decides what you are going to eat all day or all week or all year and particularly having the same thing all year long will be the right answer, you would say it can't be.

I think the Garden of Eden is not a bad starting point seems like good company seems like a diverse and diverse group of friends I can almost feel the sun I can feel the light fought the breeze the smell on a more serious note this is called Alice tisha los Scientists have discovered that what you want is the stimulation of your

senses

and you want that stimulation to vary and oscillate throughout the day. If you have, even if you have the perfect simulation, wanting to vary the same thing throughout the day is bad for you, then there is a very interesting situation.

An interesting man named Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten wrote an important book called Aesthetics. He in fact invented the word Aesthetics. He aesthetics and he wanted aesthetics to be one of the serious

science

s. It was the

science

of the senses. The science of sensory cognition. His point was the sight, the sound. hearing smell all our senses are equally important and you should take care of them and use them to judge the world around you, you are going to walk in the forest and I think each of you knows how it feels after you have If you have walked in the forest, you feel how the light changes, the air changes, I mean, that's the environment I'm talking about and if you know that if you spend a few hours in the blue box, you might get a headache, I mean, for example.

Air conditioning is one of the main factors that contribute to people's headaches in the office environment. Yeah, I think if you listen to your own experience in your own senses, I think you all know what I'm talking about. They look at the light of day, there is no hour. where the light is the same color as the next one, it's blue at lunch time and it's golden yellow at night, so if you think and at night, for example, that kind of light causes your body to produce melatonin. Melatonin helps you sleep at the end of the day.

Although if you spend your time in an office, will you keep the blue light? You come home and can't sleep, but that's because you've spent the entire day in a blue-lit office building and it comes with a different kind of blue. I want Now let's talk about three projects, so starting with a healthcare project, this is a very humble project for Maggie in Manchester. Maggie's Building Center for Cancer Care. We were trying to make a very soft building. You just saw the green house at the end and we actually went. We went back to basics and thought well, what do you think someone would like to do?

As we believe, it should be inside and outside and of course it has natural ventilation, it should feel very natural and earthy, but we like the idea of ​​sitting in a chair. a terrace even in Manchester, you see, we rendered that it was rain, that it's beautiful to enjoy the rain, to listen to the rain, to smell the trees, to smell the different seasons, the grass, that's actually what we think life is about on a completely different scale than the one we are working with. When the European Space Agency thinks about habitats on the moon, we realize that all natural history doesn't quite work.

Natural ventilation on the moon doesn't work at all, so there's a fascination here and I want to show you that we work with a lot of scientists and a lot of science has actually come into our work in the last few years, probably in December, in the last few decades. , we already worked with the people who were on the international space station and they told us that it was fascinating that the things that were lost most after family and friends smelled of fresh air, the space station had a window designed for that, The window was supposed to be a big window and it was designed in the '80s, that window was designed, it was built as a prototype and then they made it.

Since the budget cuts did not take them, they decided to move forward, take other pieces and finally in 2010 the window arrived and it was an incredible copulation that allowed people to lower their eyes. The control engineer says this is not critical to this mission, there is no scientific need for a window, but I actually think it's a matter of humanity and I think that in It is actually important to fight for things that, in reality, are for us. It's for human beings, so I just bring this as a monument to the people and Durin and let's fight for something that's right.

We are doing another mission to Mars. 3D printing of habitats on Mars. We sent swarms of small robots in front of the astronauts. where we think people won't want to live in 2001 Space Odyssey environments, they won't want to be surrounded by white plastic, they'll probably like real textures and materials, which actually came from research working with the Halley team at the South Pole Station. understanding human beings and it's actually a big part of our research. We have evolved from an architectural practice to something very unusual. We have many scientists. We have psychologists. We have artists with people who do special performances and special simulations of the airflow.

This is the scientist Carlos who developed the gadget from him and it is used for emotional mapping and you can basically use it to walk and track with a film and also the intensity of your experience, how it felt, you can see who started in our office where he was . Probably a bit bored, then his excitement level increased as he made his way along the Thames and he must have met some more exciting ones on the corner of Kings Road, but he's not telling us who he was, we are too, but we're taking. It's very serious, we're building software, we have special building physics scientists trying to figure out how can I simulate how people will feel.

Can I simulate it with software? Do I really build physical models? This is a chamber that is then filled with smoke and the smoke rises around the heat of your own body, all this became the basis for the campus project in Cupertino, in which Steve Jobs collaborated very closely, who no longer is with us, and Johnny I, and we're basically trying to leave. Back to basics, in the fire, what do human beings really want? What is the perfect environment that would foster creativity and foster innovation? And we broke down the barriers completely. We treated the longest sheets of glass in the world, but still maintained the natural ventilation that you can see.

It's the air moving over the top, you can see the air passing through this space into the spaces so people can smell the outside and break the barriers of inside and outside people work in the park they run in the park the building and the park become one and now just one little thing that I thought would be fun for you and it's the flagship of the Big Apple in Union Square and it's all about breaking barriers. Can you imagine we were outside looking at the yard? The wall opens up, it's 12 by 12 meters high and we could let the afternoon breeze come into this space and have this semi inside and out conference and that's basically what I'm talking about and I tell my best friend .

On a serious note, I think I have for you that I wish you would go home. You would go back to your offices to the places where you work on Monday and justwould you pause for a moment and say: how does this really feel? Does this place really stimulate? my senses or you're doing well, it's not like that, it's monotonous, it's bland, I have no control and in fact I think you deserve better and I think everyone deserves spaces that really meet the definition of Baumgarten z, you know you should have spaces aesthetically pleasant ones that delight all your senses so break the barriers because you have the right and you should have better spaces thank you very much