The Science Behind Healthy Buildings - with Emily Anthes

Written By Erin Peavey

 Emily Anthes is an award-winning science journalist and author whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Atlantic Wired, Nature, to name a few. Emily has a master's degree in science writing from MIT and a bachelor's degree in the history of science and medicine from Yale, where she also studied creative writing. Emily lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Episode Show notes

(Transcript from our interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.)

Erin: What's your earliest memory of the impact of the built environment?

Emily: As I say early in the book, I am and have always been ‘indoorsy’. I was an indoor kid, did not play sports. I liked to curl up with a book and I have grown into an indoorsy adult. Despite that, I did not pay much attention to the indoor environment and I cannot even think of my first memory of being aware of the built environment. In some ways, that is what spurred me to write this book. I am a science journalist, and I read a lot of the scientific literature, and I started seeing studies about the science of the indoors. This made me realize that I spend so much time indoors, but I have never analyzed or thought critically about my surroundings. I truly became aware of the built environment a few years ago when I started writing this book.

What made you start writing the book, The Great Indoors?

Almost a decade ago, I read studies on the indoor microbiome. Over the last two decades, it has become immensely popular. In addition to traveling all over the planet into remote places, scientists were starting to go into our buildings to collect samples and sequence the microbes present there. The findings were astounding, like the average American home has around 2000 different types of microbes. This made me realize that my home is an ecosystem. As a science writer, I was fascinated by this and started to think what else am I missing? So, this is how I started working on the book.

What is the link between public health and the built environment, and how you would like to see it change?

I think sometimes people do not realize, though architects and urban planners might, that changes to the built environment played a significant role in helping us conquer infectious disease in the 19th century. Especially if you look at the urban environments at that time, and I focus on in the book, particularly New York, were hotspots for infectious diseases. They were unsanitary, did not have sanitation, indoor plumbing was rare and there was no zoning. Such conditions were incubators for TB, Cholera, and yellow fever. The sanitary revolution that came along at the end of the 19th century really helped tackle and bring down the disease rates.

Reforms like requiring that every room in a tenement building have a window that opens to the outdoors, zoning, sanitation, and street cleaning played a key role in making things better. Cities were able to bring down these disease rates before the arrival of vaccines and antibiotics, purely through changes to the built environment. In the industrialized developed world, the biggest threats are conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and vascular problems like stroke, etc. This made architects and urban planners wonder, can the same approach to redesign the built environment be used bring down the incidence of some of these chronic diseases? Evidence suggests that by redesigning a neighborhood we can nudge people into healthier behaviors by design.

“Evidence suggests that by redesigning a neighborhood we can nudge people into healthier behaviors by design.”

How did our cities start to become carved up in the way that they are today, and where do you see those glimmers of hope for change?

It traces back to the central culprit really being the ‘car’. Once cars began to be mass produced, became affordable and accessible to everyday Americans, that had a huge ripple effects on how we designed our cities. People moved out of the urban core and into suburbs, and suburbs began to sprawl. As a result, they stopped making neighborhoods walkable. We moved away from mixed use of zoning, or even before that no zoning to strict divisions between residential areas and commercial areas. Cities around the world have started to think about prioritizing pedestrians over cars and how can we shift the balance back.

“Cities around the world have started to think about prioritizing pedestrians over cars and how can we shift the balance back.”

What do you see as the path to more inclusive and universal design?

While there is still a long way to go with even basic wheelchair accessibility, even less attention has been paid to Autistic adults or people with PTSD, ADHD, epilepsy, migraines, etc. All of these conditions and disabilities can affect how we process and behave in the built environment. It starts to become difficult when you realize that there are so many different people with so many different sensitivities. How can we possibly create a design that is inclusive for all? Interestingly, good design for people with these conditions is often the same as just good design. All building occupants would be happy to see these things like loud noises, distracting and glaring visuals, or lack of good sightlines go away. Curb cuts for instance, which were created for people with wheelchairs made things easier for people with scooters, bikes, strollers, or grocery cards.

Thinking about ways in which special populations might be sensitive to bad design can guide us to create environments that are better for everyone. Interesting research shows that coming out at the neighborhood level, if you spruce up vacant lots and remove litter from streets, it draws people out of their homes. Not only do they get access to fresh air and nature, but they also engage with their neighbors and a sense of community follows. The behavior of the people is being shaped by the quality of the built environment.

“The behavior of the people is being shaped by the quality of the built environment.”

Why do you think the open office design backfired?

There is evidence that in an office environment, despite electronic communication, face-to-face interactions remain the gold standard. Workplace teams are more cohesive and perform better when they have more face-to-face interactions. Recent studies have shown that switching from closed office to open offices, face-to-face communication plummeted, and it was replaced by digital communication. As such models take away things like personal space and privacy, they are driving people away from face-to-face interactions and towards online alternatives. So, there is accumulating evidence that that open offices can backfire in that way.

Open offices also have implications for infectious disease spread. Even before the pandemic, there were studies showing that people who worked in open offices took more sick days. If you do not have walls to separate you from someone who might be sick, you might be more likely to get it.

You had mentioned about seeing those synergies like it is all just in good design, could you elaborate that?

First, there is no such thing as one size fits all design, we all have different needs and sensitivities. Like for individuals, your own needs might change or often change throughout the course of the day. There are several principles discovered by the scientists that seem to be broadly good for everyone in nearly every circumstance. It speaks to our deep needs as humans, one of which is to connect with nature. So, bringing elements of nature into the indoor environment can have benefits for our physical and psychological health, and cognitive performance. Nature seems to make people more active.

Other things that fall into that category are things like daylight or good indoor air quality. All of those things are likely to be good for everyone and to have benefits that really range across the spectrum.

“There are several principles discovered by the scientists that seem to be broadly good for everyone in nearly every circumstance.”

Do you find that those principles tend to relate to sort of evolutionary benefits or something else?

One of the best ways to create a healthy indoor environment is to find ways to incorporate elements of the outdoor environment like nature, daylight, and fresh air. One of the things that happened over the course of the 20th century, for a variety of reasons is that our buildings became tightly sealed and are like hermetically sealed capsules. Moving forward, we should be thinking about is how do we create more permeability between indoor and outdoor spaces. It could be literal like outdoor walkways and open windows, but sometimes it might be metaphorical like bringing in design elements that remind us of nature.

How does climate resilience really hurt the social fabric and hurt the ability for people to be connected with one another?

As design is often a series of tradeoffs and there are different compelling objectives and absolutely creating a home that is not going to flood in a hurricane is important, like in New Orleans after hurricane Katarina. But by putting houses on stilts, you are not only changing the character of the neighborhood, but also potentially cutting community ties. There are also other obstacles like elderly or disabled people. It might be difficult to go up two flights of stairs every time you want to go into your home. This prompted engineers to think about the other possible solutions.

Elizabeth English came up with the idea to amphibiate the traditional houses in New Orleans. This is accomplished by creating a home that rests on the ground, but it has buoyancy blocks underneath. So, if there is a flood, the house can float up on the surface of the water, and when the waters recede, it lowers itself back. Another example of amphibious buildings is from a fishing community in rural Louisiana called Old River Landing. The residents had to come up with an amphibious strategy on their own, because they live on the banks of the Mississippi, and a place that floods every spring. This has turned into the Buoyant Foundation project.

If there is one thing in in this overarching help book and topic area that you wish more people knew when they were designing about social connection and the role of the built environment, what would you tell them?  

The first thing that comes to mind is the permeability lesson and we could broaden that. So, we want to create homes and office buildings that are not just more permeable between indoors and outdoors in nature and non-nature, but if you are thinking about community and social interaction, that really allows us to move seamlessly between private and public space, and community and personal settings. There is not a design trigger tool that can be applied everywhere, but the question is, how can we create and break down some of the barriers in our built environment? However, you define those barriers to create sort of more open inclusive spaces. '

“if you are thinking about community and social interaction, that really allows us to move seamlessly between private and public space, and community and personal settings.”

Is there anything else that you wish that I had asked about or want to leave us with?

If I could snap my fingers and make the pandemic go away, I would. It is the cost of the new normal, I hope that one of the very small Silver Linings is that it is making people think a bit more critically about the built environment and their indoor environments. It is an opening to possibly apply some of these lessons we have learned. I think people are seeing their own space in a way that they have not before.

“[Through the pandemic], I think people are seeing their own space in a way that they have not before.”

Where to Find Emily Anthes

Resources Mentioned

  • The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness by Emily Anthes

  • Amphibious Housing: An Innovative Approach to Seasonal Flood Mitigation for Vulnerable First Nations Communities by Ropel-Morski, Zachary, Elizabeth English, and Scott Turner

About the Host

Erin is an architect and design researcher bridging the gap between research and practice with a focus on design for health. She believes in the power of places to heal, connect, and serve vulnerable people — from hospital patients and staff, to people struggling with social isolation and mental health challenges. Erin is driven by a commitment to help others and the joy of working together to solve complex problems with shared purpose.

Erin Peavey https://erinpeavey.com
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