It has been quite a while since my last post to this blog. I have been busy developing a book describing some of my experiences in sustainable building, and the following is a draft of a chapter I'm working on. Feedback is welcomed!
The 3.8 billion years of evolution
of the DNA strand that uniquely identifies the human genome has invested in
humanity a host of sensory inputs that are essential to our survival. This distinctive combination of skills has
made Homo sapiens the single most efficient predator on the planet. We possess an exceptional set of sensors from
which we extract many subtle cues from our environment, providing us with
constant reassurance of our safety. If
our building designs do not satisfy our innate security interests, then we feel
disconnected.
Various theories and hypotheses
about the interaction between man, nature, and the built environment have been
proposed. Biophilia references the
spiritual aspect of a visual contact with nature. Eco-psychology submits that contact with
nature extends a bond that provides sensations of harmony, balance, and
stability. Environmental psychology
addresses the psychological responses we have to environmental stresses, and
proponents have performed studies on the effect of the built environment on
human behavior.
Humans thrive in many harsh
environments from the desert to the arctic.
We have designed and built protective shelters unique to each of these
environments to facilitate our survival.
From these shelters we obtain security, comfort, convenience, and
efficiency. The scientific community
lists as many as 21 acquired sensory traits in humans, with many appearing to
be subsets of the five senses of taste, touch, smell, hearing, and vision. In addition to these five familiar traits,
breathing is relevant as a sixth sense as it relates to how we design our
buildings.
The need to satisfy these elemental
instincts is no more a discussion of nature vs. nurture than learning to cry or
breathe is a response to a sharp whack by an obstetrician. Removing your hand from a heat source is not
a learned response. The smell of bread
baking in the oven is not a learned response.
Tastes of bitter, sweet, salty, and sour are not learned, but serve to
sharpen our survival skills. Addressing
these most basic instincts in our building designs provides for our sense of
security.
Each of these six sensory inputs has
an impact on how we design and operate our buildings on an elemental level that
exceeds what can be derived from a spiritual or psychological influence. As we think of these senses, they are so
primal that we are unconscious of their origin and impact. We taste because we have taste receptors, we
feel the touch of heat and cold because we have a neuro-chemical response to
those influences. We see, hear, and
breathe from the moment we are born with no thought to the implications. We have responses to each of these sensory
inputs that affect our survival and are hardwired into our essence.
The confluence of building design
and our sensory inputs can be dissected to determine how we must consider
building design in light of our primal security needs.
Taste
is something that few building design elements incorporate. The notable exception is water. Certainly clean water is essential to
survival, and our sense of taste is an excellent tool for discerning much about
water quality. Some water sources
require treatment systems that affect taste and have long term health repercussions. There is no single right solution for every
situation as both the water sources and the recipients have so much variability
in taste and quality.
In this context, taste is often a
tool we use to assure safety, though not always successfully. In nature we obtain clues about water safety
based on observations of the natural environment around the source. Today we rely on testing to provide for water
quality that we rely on for survival.
This does not correspond to our desire for taste which is inherently an
individual preference and may be addressed through any number of technological
remedies from filtration to reverse osmosis.
Touch is perhaps the easiest sensory input to
control. Texture is an element of
building design that provides contextual cues to our location. We make material selections based on regional
availability, tradition, technological innovation, and aesthetic
preferences. As a means of survival, we
use textures as environmental cues to our location. In the absence of sight, we navigate spaces
with subtle cues from the texture of floors, walls, furniture, and the acoustic
footprints imposed by the textures in a room.
Airflow also contributes to the ability to orient in a given space.
The sense of touch has a subset that
includes thermal awareness. As a survival
tool our sense of environmental temperature ranges from severe cold to severe
heat. Protection from the elements is an
essential survival mechanism, and we have made tremendous strides in our
capacity to control our thermal comfort in the last half century.
Smell is another essential survival tool. People are
extremely sensitive to indoor air quality, and mold, mildew, and decay, are
cues to the health of our buildings that we are superbly adapted to discover.
We have done a marvelous job of eliminating olfactory distractions and dangers
from our indoor environment. To our
credit, we have accomplished this by installing exhaust fans, air exchangers,
and construction materials with no volatile organic compounds to reduce or
eliminate the potential for injury. To
our detriment we have masked odors with perfumes and deodorants.
As a matter of survival we rely on
smell to protect us from harm. Smells
that affect our survival include gas leaks, smoke, vegetation, disease,
poisons, and finding a mate. Taste and
smell are inextricably tied together, with both eliciting strong memory
responses to events in our lives. The
examples of baking bread, burning toast, steak on the grill, skunks, campfires,
rotting plants, pine forests, and ozone from an approaching thunderstorm will
likely have evoked either a positive or negative response based on individual
experience. These responses directly
impact our fight or flight instinct.
Hearing
is a sensory receptor for which we actively design elements in our buildings,
most notably the installation of warning devices like fire and carbon monoxide
alarms. As a survival mechanism, we have
trained ourselves to be alert for familiar sounds. The sound of the refrigerator kicking on, the
noises we associate with the furnace, the whooshing noise of the gas burner on
the hot water heater, the squeaking floor boards, the rattling windows, all
form a symphony that we learn to identify as friendly. A noise out of place may be a threat, and we
react to that threat instinctively. How
many of us have gotten out of bed to investigate an unfamiliar noise?
Acoustic control affects our
productivity by either allowing better reception of sound or masking sounds as
needed for the right application.
Isolation from sounds that can provide us with cues to our survival
makes us uneasy. The total absence of
sound in a recording studio sound booth is very disorienting. Ironically, superinsulated buildings dampen
exterior sounds nearly to the point of simulating a sound booth
environment. The sound of wind, rain,
mild thunderstorms, traffic, and animal noises, are virtually obliterated by a
highly thermally efficient envelope.
This isolation from exterior sounds provides the same sense of
disorientation experienced in a sound booth.
Vision is the sensory input that we most value. We gather a great deal of information
visually, so having access to a view is vital to our comfort. This is the most complex sensory interaction
with the environment as it affects design.
In our hermetically sealed indoor environments, our sense of security is
enhanced by our ability to observe threats to our survival.
We build
shelter for protection from predators, the weather, and even war. As a survival tool a visual connection
provides for these protections, but also maintains a connection with our need
to observe our environment for both predators and prey. Today we gather our prey at the grocery
store, but this recent agricultural innovation does not satisfy billions of
years of evolutionary conditioning.
We evolved over these billions of
years in a landscape that included only natural light. It seems intuitive that our ability to
observe threats in the environment is best served by our long evolutionary
adaptation to natural light. The recent
innovation of artificial light leaves us with an impaired capacity to fully
access all of the information we need to assure our continued survival.
Flickering light from alternating
current energy sources can cause headaches, eye strain, and visual discomfort,
though ballast technology has provided a dramatic improvement. Another effect of artificial light is the
interruption to our natural circadian rhythms.
The artificial extension of daylight plays havoc with our natural sleep
cycle, turning certain segments of the population into either curmudgeons or
teenagers.
There is some evidence that
artificial light creates negative health effects. High percentages of blue and green in
artificial light suppress the production of the mood and stress hormones
cortisol, DHEA, and melatonin. This can
be overcome with proper lighting design and careful attention to wavelengths in
the red spectrum. Light-source injuries
occur from the familiar burns produced by extreme exposure to UV or infrared
radiation, for which we require protections either from the source or from poor
judgment.
Breathing
is the response we have to lack of oxygen and it elicits a powerful survival
response. Being underwater for an
extended period of time is an extreme example.
To a lesser extent we feel the same sensation at high altitudes and in
enclosed spaces. You may be able to
identify a time when you were in a room that felt stuffy or where you felt as
if you were struggling for breath. A
lack of oxygen, a surfeit of carbon dioxide, or the presence of carbon monoxide
sends us a signal that all is not well and that we must act to change our
environment. The instinct to breathe is
unconscious until we find our ability to breathe compromised. Building design contributes to our ability to
satisfy this most basic instinct.
Early symptoms of lack of oxygen
manifest as a sense of being in a stuffy room, progressing to headaches and
vomiting, to death. Ventilation in
building design is required by building code, but lack of attention to the
details of this requirement has many repercussions.
We are remarkably sensitive to
toxins in the air. The built environment
has historically used many materials which off-gassed toxins into increasingly
better-sealed interior environments. The
advent of sick building syndrome drove home the importance of protecting our
indoor environment from accumulating toxins, and building component
manufacturers rose to the challenge of designing new materials that would not
contribute to building toxicity.
We have become more adept at
exchanging indoor air for fresh outside air, and walking the tightrope
balancing the requirement for fresh air with the energy cost of treating those
volumes of air. With good design we can
eliminate almost all materials that contribute toxins and particulates, and we
can continually refresh the indoor environment from the accumulation of CO2
from breathing, cooking, and combustion, as well as cleaning chemicals,
perfumes, and other introduced chemicals.
Manifestations of sensitivity to
poor air quality from inhaled toxins include respiratory infections, asthma,
hives, pneumonia, bronchitis, and asphyxia among others. The complexity of designing buildings to
reduce exposure to chemical irritants cannot be understated.
A fine line
separates instinctive responses to stimuli and learned responses. We instinctively react to bitter or sweet
tastes, withdraw from acrid odors, and have a startle response to loud
sounds. We instinctively react to heat
from a flame, and none of us would be here had we not drawn our first
breath. We further calibrate our
responses by learning about environmental cues that provide for our sense of
security or pose a threat. What tastes
and odors are noxious, and which are life sustaining. Which sounds are natural and which constitute
a threat. We see and feel the need for protection
against the elements and learn what constitutes that level of protection. With every breath, in association with taste
and smell, we make minute observations about the local environment.
Our physical
senses are not the only aspects of our sense of security in a building. In
contemporary society financial security plays an important role in our comfort
level. Monetary exchanges for
specialized goods and services have replaced the independence that we enjoyed
in hunter-gatherer societies, where skillsets were not as neatly isolated as
they are today. Generalization in
skillsets assured greater species survival than specialization until an
exchange system became universal. With
this relatively new adaptation, we require security in our financial realm to
assure our continued survival. Savings,
social security, community resources, wealth accumulation — all contribute to
this sense of security.
Good
building design can help facilitate our financial security. The design of a net zero energy building
secures energy independence for the foreseeable future. The elimination of indoor environmental
toxicity secures our continued good health, lack of which is a leading
contributor to financial insecurity.
Securing an independent access to safe, clean, water provides a rare
layer of security in modern society as competition for this resource becomes
increasingly common. These are a few of
many aspects of green building that provide a hedge against discontinuity in a
global economy.
Absenteeism
in the US caused by lack of health security is approximately 3%, costing the
average employer over $2,000 per year per employee. Lost productivity from ‘presenteeism’
(present but sick) is nearly quadruple that.
Building design has a profound impact on human health in our homes,
schools, and workplaces. Indoor
environmental quality is directly relevant to the quality of life we enjoy as
it relates to our connection with the outdoor environment, and the elimination
of toxic chemical concentrations.
At particular
risk in an indoor environment are the young, the economically disadvantaged, and
the elderly. Poor quality housing,
schools, and workplaces increase the risk for poor health. The young and the elderly may have
underdeveloped or compromised immune systems.
The loss of income from poor health for those with few financial
resources has a disproportionately greater impact. Exposure to poor quality housing, poor school
districts, and poor quality jobs with poor working conditions exacerbate the environmental
conditions that affect their health. A
single lost day of wages creates significantly greater stress for the
impoverished person than a walk in the woods will cure.
Another
aspect of our sense of security began to emerge as a design consideration after
the lessons of the collapse of the Twin Towers and Hurricane Katrina exposed
vulnerabilities in our capacity to respond to a breakdown in social order. The ability of building design to serve basic
human needs in light of a catastrophic failure is beginning to enter the
sustainable building lexicon.
Passive
survivability reflects the ability of a building design to maintain critical
life-support conditions in the event of an extended power outage, fuel supply
interruption, or water shortage. Conventional design
vulnerabilities can be overcome by considering passive solutions for storm
resilience, terrorist threats, and interruptions in heating, cooling,
ventilation, lighting, energy, and water.
Consistent
with our evolution as the most efficient predator in the history of the planet
is the development of a social structure that presents another layer of
security. Species that aggregate in a
communal structure benefit from the capacity to repel predators and in their
ability to hunt and collect food.
Dolphins, lions, and wolves are among many socially structured
communities that herd their prey and collaborate to optimize their kill.
As community
members we also communicate survival lessons to successive generations. These learned behaviors can adapt over short
time periods as environmental conditions change. The development of agriculture some 12,000
years ago made communities more sustainable with less need to follow migrating
food sources. In contemporary society,
where our skillsets have become highly specialized, we require community
structures to provide support systems from broad skillsets we no longer
retain. We may program computers for a
living, but we do not likely also grow our own food, generate our own power, or
provide for our own water sources.
In designing
our communities we need to observe the elements that contribute to our sense of
security. Volumes have been written on
community development over the years, with many well-intentioned plans such as
urban renewal demonstrating a poor grasp of the basic human need for
security. The benefits of establishing a
robust community social structure were ignored in favor of a minimum-first-cost
philosophy applied to warehouse housing.
Aside from the wrenching social cost of displacing existing communities,
little of the support structure to keep a community viable was developed to
assure the success of these projects.
There was a decided lack of attention to providing access to local services
like banks, medical care, grocery, libraries, churches, pharmacies,
entertainment, jobs, or the physical security to be able to walk through the
community.
Each of
these sensory inputs has direct ties to our evolutionary development and our
inborn capabilities to survive in the environment. As the building envelope isolates us from
access to the cues we require to satisfy our security needs, we need to be
aware of the impact of building design on our human capabilities. How do we reconcile our need to connect with
the exterior environment and provide protections from the hazards we experience
in modern life.
By design we
can build the infrastructure required to resolve 3.8 billion years’ worth of
aggregated fears, improving our security in our choice of refuge. Though there are many influences that affect
our perception of security, those that are hardwired into our genetic code have
the greatest impact on our sense of well-being.
Samuel D Pobst, LEED Fellow
LEED AP® BO+M BD+C ID+C Homes
© 2015