Physical Environments
Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka, in Memory of Helen Keller
Photo by Takahiro Hayashi is licensed under cc by-sa 2.0
When I was a design student, some 15 years ago, a professor told me about the Reversible Destiny lofts, a multi-family residence designed to challenge its elderly occupants’ five senses in an attempt to slow down aging and enable their bodies to build strength through resilience. As the thinking goes, this boosts the immune system and makes the residents more resistant to old age ailments, among numerous other health benefits.
While we live in a world where comfort is of the utmost importance and convenience is king, we have become too accustomed to having a high degree of comfort and security all the time. Many accidental injuries are no longer fatal thanks to medical progress, and even in the midst of a global pandemic, with medical resources stretched to the limit, we still count on modern medicine to come up with a solution, just as it has for many other diseases and causes of death. And yet, the majority of humans still do not fulfill the body’s biological capacity to live well past a century.
If you want to build muscle, you have to regularly lift weights, breaking down your muscle fibres so that they can rebuild themselves stronger. To strengthen our bodies and our minds, we have to constantly challenge them, which makes us more resilient and slows aging down.
I truly believe that our living environments, by challenging us to become more resilient, can help us achieve not only longer but also stronger lives. Glenn Murcutt once quipped that when one is not comfortable in a building, one should put on or take off layers, as the human body has not evolved to operate at a constant 21 degrees Celsius and 70 per cent humidity.
While there are many other factors, such as diet, mental health and exercise regimen, that affect our aging potential, more challenging habitats, properly designed, may provide great advantages. By removing a little bit of comfort and convenience from our lives to make them more challenging and interesting, we can become stronger human beings. It’s the residential design equivalent to purposely avoiding elevator rides to take the stairs. These little changes, when compounded, amount to significant benefits.
Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka, in Memory of Helen Keller
Photo by Takahiro Hayashi is licensed under cc by-sa 2.0
Now that COVID-19 has hit us with the full force of Ali’s uppercut to the ribs, we are facing a whole new set of challenges that few, if any, of us were prepared for. For most of us, that challenge is not as much physical in nature as it is mental. How do we deal with staying in one place for extended periods of time without much of an opportunity to go out at all, with no end date in sight, while attempting to manage stir-crazy kids who are not equipped to fully grasp the situation?
Our mental state is deeply affected by our physical environment. We’re already hearing stories of people who go absolutely crazy secluding themselves in condos the size of a shoebox. I would too if that were me. This is not the kind of discomfort we should be looking for. I’d even argue that in difficult, stressful times, this type of discomfort is the last thing we should be seeking, as our already-taxed physiology needs all the rest it can get to successfully manage these troubled times. Managing stress becomes a survival skill in a pandemic.
Ironically, I think that if our living environments were more thoughtfully designed and appropriately challenging, like the Reversible Destiny lofts, their physically demanding nature would stimulate us in all kinds of interesting ways, perhaps nudging us to be more active.
It seems that the ideal may lie somewhere in the middle: environments that fulfill our basic needs with lots of natural light, greenery, and fresh air, while stimulating us physically and mentally to push ourselves just outside of our comfort zone, keeping us alert and in good health, with a stronger immune system and lower stress levels.
One thing is sure, this is a tremendous opportunity to rethink the way we live and invent new ways to tackle living challenges from a holistic health perspective. Instead of maximizing floor-plate efficiency at the expense of the inhabitants’ health, we really ought to design things the other way around.