Is it a bad day that puts someone in a bad mood, or could it be the room they’re sitting in? The environments we place ourselves in function as much more than just mere backdrops, and the way spaces are designed can greatly influence how the people in them feel and react. A simple window can mean the difference between health and sickness, and the height of a ceiling may unlock creativity.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen is an architecture critic and an author. Her latest book, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, is about how the environments we are in shape us in some ways we realize and in many ways that we don’t.

Sarah and Greg discuss Sarah’s background and how she forged her own path to the field of environmental psychology. They talk about different known features of built architecture that affect humans in non-conscious ways, like higher ceilings, sharp angles, and the presence of windows. Sarah also introduces and explains how we experience a sort of ‘blindsight’ everyday.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

The importance of attention management for designers

13:54: I often say to architects part of your job is attention management. Don't make people pay attention when they're just trying to find their way. They've got better things to do. They're stressed anyway, unless they're going into a hospital, a classroom, or whatever. They want to get there. That's not where you want them to pay attention, but you do want them to pay attention in, for example, so-called “restorative spaces,” which are spaces that people can deliberately design in order to slow people down, let them notice, in a fascinated and intriguing way, what's around them, which is shown to lower cortisol levels, relax people, and make them less stressed. 

Neutral buildings don’t exist

19:43: There is no such thing as a neutral building. If a building is not helping the people who are using it, it's probably hurting them. And you can do a bad building or a good building at any level of investment for the same amount of money.

Do we have blindsight in our environments?

28:15: Most of the time, people don't pay a whole lot of attention to their environments. They're busy. We're all busy. You're not thinking about your environment, but that doesn't mean the environment isn't affecting you. So in this sense, we're all blindsighted.

Something to look forward to in the built environment

42:53: The most interesting thing that is happening in the built environment right now is probably related to the workplace because nobody can figure out what the workplace is for, how to use it, what it should be for, how to reconfigure these monoliths that we have that were meant for a kind of work that most people don't want to do anymore. And I think that there is more data. Around the workplace and around healthcare than there is around anything else. Because, of course, those are two big money drivers in the economy, and it will be very interesting to see. And some organizations involved in this space are already beginning to incorporate insights from environmental psychology and other research?

• Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson
• The Mirror Neuron System
• Blindsight BBC Article
• Peter Barrett’s Classroom Research
• Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture

• Professional Profile on Van Alen Institute
• Sarah Williams Goldhagen's Website
• Sarah Williams Goldhagen on LinkedIn
• Sarah Williams Goldhagen on Twitter
• Sarah Williams Goldhagen on Instagram
• Sarah Williams Goldhagen on Talks at Google

• Sarah Williams Goldhagen on Google Scholar
• Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives
• Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism