The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How Building Can Create Health

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

No space is neutral, according to author Tye Farrow, and it either adds to or diminishes a person's well-being. Purpose-designed buildings not only help motivate and inspire the people occupying them, they also improve overall health and performance in their bodies and minds, he says. A look at the links between physiological health and the types of buildings that improve it, with Tye Farrow, architect and author of "Constructing Health: How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind's Health."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's called Constructing Health, How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind's Health. And he joins us now for more. Ty, it's great to see you again. How are you doing? Steve, very well. Great to see you. Excellent. Constructing Health. What do you mean by that? Well, what we need to begin to start reimagining our built environments as health generating systems, beginning to look at how the built environment affects our biological, our accelerants for our biological, our physical and our mind health, and specifically using the word mind health instead of mental health, because it seen as an asset-based view as opposed to a deficit-based view. Do we not do this already?

Well, I think a lot of our environments that we build are, let's say, they're like a hamburger. What do I mean by that? Well, a hamburger, if you think of it as something to eat, it's very practical, it's very functional. You don't need a plate and a knife, you can pick it up and eat it. It does what it's asked for. It gives you the protein and the calorie. But arguably, what it does is a lot of bad things to your body because of the sodium content and other things. And it leaves you feeling empty after an hour. So how many of the environments that we inhabit do the same thing? And so what the basis of the book is, is trying to get into

the idea that we have to look at our environments, not for what the architecture is, but what it does, and what it does to your physiological, your psychological, and your biological health, meaning it's an accelerant for them. And how do you know that doing it this way actually improves all of those things? Well, here's a good, there's two things that I discovered in researching the book, and they were around whales and mice. And so let's sort out how those relate to the book. The first thing is we spend more time inside our built environment than most whales do underwater. I mean, that's remarkable. But more so, we're very worried about how the whales or

the other marine things, because we know the microplastics and we know the other stuff, have a terrible effect on the biology of the marine life. If we take that a step forward at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s, amazing lady called Diamond, and she took mice. She put mice in a regular cage with a running wheel,

mice in an enriched environment with things to run around and have fun, and then mice in what would be called an impoverished environment, like a lot of the places we occupy, you know, like lab cages. And after 30 days, she dissects the brains. What does she discover? This is only 30 days. This is mice in an enriched environment or impoverished. After 30 days, she found the mice in the enriched environments,

the synapse connections between the neurons, very, very important. They grew at a rate of 25%. The cortex on top also strengthened. What happened to the poor little mice in the impoverished lab cages? Well, in fact, the synapse began to wilt the same way that a plant does without water or otherwise. Meaning that the environment changes the structure of your brain and it changes the biology of your body. So there's every reason to assume, because with mice it's often the same as with humans, that if we work in a beautiful environment with a pleasant looking building, as opposed to in a box that does nothing for you,

that we will be, I don't know what, never mind happier, but more efficient, more everything when we come to work? It's human performance. It's space as human performance. And what do I mean by that? Another example, if they looked at a study of 2,000 classrooms, 20,000 kids, and they looked at just the quality of daylight, not glare, and what did they discover? The students that had a good quality of daylight performed 25% better in reading and 20% better on mathematics. If I said to you, if you're running a business or an organization or something else, if I said I could enhance the performance of your team by 20%, would that have an impact?

Sign me up. Say I'm wrong. Say it's only 15%. Say it's only 10%. It's massive. And when you take that a step forward, that you look at if you spend $1, a nominal, say, $1 on a building, how much does it

cost to, over the same life of the building, does it cost to heat and cool it? $5. So you better focus on that, anything in the $1 that impacts the $5. But what's the cost of your team and your staff in that same period compared to the $5 in the one5 and the $1? Is it $10? Is it $50? Is it $100? It's $200. So if there's any impact on that $1 that enhances performance, the ability to thrive and prosper, like the students in the classroom or the poor little mice or the enhanced mice, is the impact of any of that, those pennies on the dollars has significant impact on the performance. And that's why we're being hired by a variety of these different groups, because it is about human performance

as a result of the way we create the places we thrive and flourish. Let's take a look at some of what you've been doing here. And, okay, Sheldon, you want to bring this up? This is, I think, the Helmsley Cancer Center in Jerusalem. Look at that building. Now, if that doesn't wake you up and make you feel good about the world when you come to work every day, just, okay, we've got people listening to us on podcast now who can't see this. So describe for them what we're looking at here. So this is the largest mass timber building in the entire region.

This is built in a city that's 5,000 years old, and it is the largest and the biggest mass timber in that area, a city that's built of stone, that has no building codes that allow it to be built. This is shot from some of the shots from the side. But when people come up, it's a cancer center, and they call it the butterfly. And why a butterfly?

Well, the butterfly is important because buildings communicate to us. Our body is like a radar dish. And a butterfly is a symbol of the metamorphosis that you're going through on a cancer journey, like from a little caterpillar to a bug. But back to performance and the impact of this on the organization. Like every hospital around the world, there are so many positions that are empty. They can't get staff to come. And even the busy, relatively new cancer centers in that country, they have the same problem.

Our building, they have a lineup of people wanting to come and work there. Because it makes them, that's how the building makes them feel, the staff, and how it makes them feel different. And all of these things can be quantified now. They're not sort of, you know, loose things. And I finished a Master of Neuroscience applied to architecture. The first Canadian with that degree. I have a degree at Harvard as well as U of T. But I'm the first Canadian that's studying the effect of space and performance. And this thing, the book, is about disseminating the information so we can

get it out further. Well, let's try this. What can you do with mass timber that you can't do with concrete and steel? So mass timber is very interesting for a variety of different reasons. And your earlier group, it was a very interesting discussion. The impact of mass timber design on health is effectively like a four-legged table, like this table with health sitting on top of it. And design has a significant impact on ecological health. And that was the discussion, you know, on your earlier panel. One cubic meter of wood is the equivalent of three and a half cars driving for a whole year. So that's very important. The other important thing is design's impact on our physical health or our economic health. Clearly, wood is very important

on economic health because a lot of the small communities in Ontario, this is, you know, floating their boats and that impacts societal health. But the important piece of the puzzle is we're not building these buildings just to solve the ecological thing, is we're building them to house people, and people gets back to performance. And so wood buildings has an impact, again, back on mind health, which is the asset-based view of it. And what do I mean by that? That if you look at the sound of wood, you know, when you walk on a wood floor, that has an impact on your theta and beta waves in your mind, which is the stress side. It begins to reduce it and increases the calming side of it.

The stress side, it begins to reduce it and increases the calming side of it. The scent of cedar, you know, that lovely, you know, that sauna you go into. What that does is reduces your cortisol levels, which puts you in a better frame of mind for thinking. And visually, it is significant because it increases social interaction, relaxation. People want to linger and spend time together. If you look at it in schools, we use a lot of it in our school environments. Why? Because it enhances the performance of students on their tests. So tell me this then. I mean, we've been hearing business and governments for decades complain about our lack of productivity in this country. You seem to have opened a potential door here that could see our numbers spike. What would have to happen in this country for there to be greater acceptance in a

move towards doing more with this? We are clearly in a period where we're beginning to take more of a holistic view of what we do and how we build. Why has that happened? Because we went through COVID and why aren't we going back to the office? Because we've discovered there's somewhere else. We don't like being in these tuna cans anymore that don't inspire us. That's right, because I perform better in these environments. And so obviously a lot of our working environments

are problematic as a result of it. But I think we've begun to discover that, you know,, the social interaction, the places we want to linger and spend time with, these things have a significant impact as a result of the places we crave. The book is absolutely gorgeous, and you've got fantastic pictures in there of different places around the world where you are doing work. How about here in Canada? Are you catching on in Canada at all? You got some projects on the go you can tell us about? We are. We have in the education sector, we've been very, very busy.

And in fact, a variety of independent schools because they're connecting the dots between places that create social interaction and gathering and empathy and sharing. And then globally, we are very busy. We've got a dozen projects in Ireland. We're very busy in Europe. Israel, we've been very, very busy

because a lot of the leadership are beginning to connect the dots between what their aspirations are as an organization and how you can use space as an accelerant to enhance the culture of the organization, the performance, or people just simply wanting to go back to the office. I'm tempted to ask you, what's the least healthy building? I don't know. You know Toronto pretty well. Look around downtown Toronto or anywhere else. You look at a building that screams unhealthy to you.

Which one? Well, let me just flip that around slightly. Let's pick two very significant buildings in the city, and what do they communicate to you? So let's take the ROM, and let's take the AGO. Okay. And so the ROM you come up to, it's got these sort of jagged shapes coming towards you and a little mouse hole that you go into, which in fact they're renovating for a couple of hundred, about a hundred million or so to open it up. When you walk inside, what do you,wall with angled walls and a little light. Let's take

another cultural institution as a comparator. Let's take the AGO. When you come towards it at the entrance, the building begins to curve back. In fact, a lot of timber in that. There's a canopy that protects you in case it's raining or otherwise. And then when you come up into the gallery spaces, you've got this sort of timber that, you know, sort of fades open and you look out onto the street. And in fact, even in the central, you know, space with a curving stair, you know, that accentuates you to want to move through it because of the materials. you know, that accentuates you to want to move through it because of the materials. Both of those communicate very, very different messages on how the environment makes you feel. And I know which one you like better now.

Well, I'm just giving examples as opposed to a critique. I get you. I get you. Let's say the name of the book again. Constructing Health, How the Built Environment Enhances Your Mind's Health. Seems so logical. Anyway, Ty Farrow, it's Built Environment Enhances Your Mind's Health. Seems so logical. Anyway, Ty Farrow, it's good of you to come into TVO tonight. Thanks so much. Great to see you and always great to chat. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions

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