Health and Biohabitability
Holistic Architecture
Evaluating our buildings from the perspective of health, well-being, and respect for the environment
WHAT IS “HOLISM”?
The holistic approach understands each idea as an interaction of multiple concepts necessarily interrelated with one another.
Holism—”holos,” meaning “whole” in Greek—aims to highlight the importance of the interdependence existing between each of the parts that compose a “whole.”
It is a current of thought that maintains that a complete system, understood as the “whole,” behaves differently from the different parts that compose it, with this total computation transcending the sum of its parts.
Understanding architecture from a holistic perspective allows us to bring together all the principles that encompass sustainable architecture with minimal impact, adopting a comprehensive vision in which each concept relates to the previous one, without being able to be explained independently.
Relating concepts to one another means enhancing them—it is not about seeking different answers for each problem, but rather proposing a single solution that attempts to respond to everything simultaneously.
This is why awareness of this interdependence allows us to address the fight against climate emergency from a more global and, therefore, effective approach.
In recent years, in response to the growing current climate concern, numerous strategies have been implemented to regulate the construction sector—the goal is to ensure that 100% of new construction buildings meet sustainability and minimal impact criteria. [1]
Furthermore, there is growing awareness that the environment we inhabit greatly influences our state of health and well-being. Our cities and our homes are in the spotlight, and an increasing number of experts and professionals are initiating debates and demanding the inclusion of health as a determining factor in the quality of a built space.
In a scenario of climate change, biodiversity loss, depletion of limited planetary resources, pollution, and great inequalities, it is urgent to rethink the way we plan our living spaces from all scales of the built environment, at regional, urban, and residential levels.
We must address each of the scales that make up the infrastructures that provide services for our vital needs and rethink them from a sustainability perspective in harmony with nature and living beings. [2]
In this regard, it is important to identify the three key strategies that define minimal impact construction and that constitute an indispensable discipline: holistic architecture.
1. HUMAN HEALTH
2. ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH
3. CONSCIOUS USE OF PLANETARY RESOURCES
The vision of architecture from a holistic perspective goes beyond achieving energy efficiency, health, or reducing environmental impact and understands architecture as part of an interconnected ecosystem that must respect life on this planet above all else.
It is about seeking comprehensive solutions that simultaneously address the needs of people, the environment, and that make conscious use of the resources available on the planet, allowing for a more efficient approach to the challenges presented by the construction of sustainable buildings with minimal impact. [3]
HUMAN HEALTH
There is a direct relationship between people’s health and the place they inhabit. A space, both interior and exterior, has the capacity to affect our physical-emotional health. In fact, since 1947, the WHO (World Health Organization) has defined health as a state of physical, mental, and social well-being.
How can architecture respect and promote health from these 3 areas?
How can we design spaces that promote our physical, mental, and social well-being?
Let us examine in detail each of the interactions of architecture with the human being.
ARCHITECTURE AND PHYSICAL HEALTH
A healthy indoor environment is determined by different factors to consider. Achieving a healthy space that respects the organism of living beings is based on different premises.
1. Thermoacoustic comfort. It is necessary to propose construction systems that allow the interior of the dwelling to be insulated from sources of excessive heat or cold as well as from acoustic pollution. To achieve this, we must work with bioclimatic criteria that use strategies from passive architecture.
2. Hygrothermal comfort. Humans have evolved in outdoor life, in humidity levels around 50%, and it is around this benchmark that our organism is healthy. The hygroscopic character of biomaterials contributes to balancing the relative humidity levels of the indoor environment.
3. Ventilation and air renewal. Furthermore, it is necessary to have good air renewal constantly, avoiding the accumulation of CO2. Ventilation is also a necessary strategy to ensure well-being during warm months without active energy consumption.
4. Absence of toxins. Construction materials, furniture, finishes, or textiles present in the home may incorporate harmful toxins that bioaccumulate in our organism, increasing our risk of suffering from conditions or diseases of environmental origin.
5. Water resources. It is also necessary to ensure that the running water supplied by our dwelling has a total absence of bacteria or chemical contaminants.
6. Electromagnetic fields. The WHO has determined EMFs (Electromagnetic Fields) as an “emerging risk,” so ensuring a healthy space implies achieving reduced levels of incidence of electromagnetic fields from both interior and exterior sources of our inhabited spaces.
MENTAL HEALTH
It has been demonstrated that the spaces we inhabit have an impact on our emotions. Daily, we are subjected to numerous stimuli that directly affect our nervous system. This explains why a space has the capacity to produce relaxation and comfort in us, or, conversely, stress and discomfort.
Advances in neuroscience have made it possible to explain the relationship between inhabited space and the central nervous system, so as to detect the emotional sequences and psychological reactions that certain environments produce when traversed.
In recent years, the term “neuroarchitecture” has begun to be commonly used among construction professionals in the conception and design of buildings.
Understanding how an environment is capable of interacting with our perceptions, our emotions, our memory, or even with our concentration and performance, represents a radically innovative vision for the creation of healthy spaces.
Neuroarchitecture aims to revalue the intangible benefits of architectural space, taking into account the cognitive perception of human senses: sight, hearing, smell, and touch.
Given the growing neuroscientific research and our own deductive capacity, a series of patterns can be established that support neuroarchitectural design.
Adequate control of lighting and color, visual contact with natural spaces, a harmonious distribution and morphology of space, built with natural materials that ensure hygrothermal, acoustic, and olfactory comfort, among others, positively activate our central nervous system, releasing hormones that produce well-being. [4]
SOCIAL HEALTH
Numerous studies agree that happiness is measured by the quality of our human relationships. We are social beings who have evolved in family and community, and that is where our comfort zone and refuge of well-being are found.
A healthy life involves creating bonds of social support with other human beings. There is an indisputable interrelationship between us that causes the need to interact with one another.
This idea of creating community has evolved throughout history, progressively transforming our ways of living together.
Among architectural models, a direct response to this need to interrelate has recently appeared. Cohousing has become an alternative model to the urban development we know in numerous central and northern European countries, based on the individuality of spaces to advance toward models based on the management and creation of a community.
There are numerous examples of projects that put the cohousing model into practice, both at the urban scale, with entire self-managed neighborhoods, and at the project scale, with specific cooperative housing projects.
VAUBAN DISTRICT (FREIBURG, Germany)
The Vauban district, located in the city of Freiburg in Germany, was founded as a military base and served as a logistics center for the French occupation after World War II.
Years later, the military complex was abandoned, until, in the 1990s, the German government purchased the former military barracks land in order to propose an urban regeneration project.
The project aimed to launch an ecological neighborhood plan that applied, from a holistic perspective, criteria of ecology, sustainability, self-sufficiency, bioclimatism, and social cohesion. It is an urban planning idea that places the health and well-being of people in the foreground with minimal impact on the planet.
The former military barracks were recovered, rehabilitated, and converted into cohousing dwellings, all surrounded by a completely transformed, pedestrianized, and re-naturalized public space.
The result of this urban utopia materializes in an excellent tram public transport connection, a balance between commercial services and public facilities and medium-intensity multi-family housing that combines energy efficiency, minimal impact construction, and quality of life. [5]
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH
While caring for our health and that of the people around us constitutes a fundamental principle for understanding the holistic vision of architecture, so is caring for the environment and the natural world with which we are deeply interconnected.
There is no health on a sick planet.
The fight to reduce environmental impact must be addressed from all areas of our society, and architecture, as a discipline that provides the life scenario for our communities, has a fundamental role in this necessary change of mindset in which no action is contemplated solely from the benefit of a few but from a perspective that addresses the common good of all living beings and the very nature that shelters them.
MINIMAL IMPACT BUILDINGS
According to data from the International Energy Agency for 2022, the construction sector represents 39% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
Around 28% corresponds to the energy consumption of buildings and the remaining 11% is attributed to the so-called embodied carbon—derived from the production processes and on-site implementation of construction materials.
Since 2018, in Spain, the energy consumption of our buildings has been regulated by the Technical Building Code. However, energy consumption is only one of the multiple points to consider on the list of impacts that the life cycle of any built environment entails.
Beyond energy, buildings generate an impact on their immediate surroundings, altering the balance of natural ecosystems and generating a significant ecological footprint.
This is why establishing criteria that allow us to evaluate the impact of each built work has become a necessary requirement to neutralize the effects produced by architecture on the environment and, thus, actively and effectively contribute to climate change mitigation.
In response to this need, the concept of NZIB—Nearly Zero Impact Buildings—was born: constructions whose life cycle has minimal or zero impact on the environment and people.
Factors such as adequate and respectful use of land, avoiding alteration of natural ecosystems and the biodiversity of the environment in which we build our homes, or strategies such as implementing waste management mechanisms—zero waste homes—through recycling and reuse, which allow extending the life cycle of the elements involved in the work, are some of the essential actions to consider.
But beyond this awareness, to address construction from a perspective based on holistic architecture design, it is necessary to include mechanisms that allow us to measure and evaluate our performance in this regard, establishing maximum values of greenhouse gas emissions for each building constructed and limiting them to advance toward decarbonization.
This undoubtedly involves the use of biomaterials or decarbonized materials with a reduced carbon footprint and also design according to bioclimatic architecture guidelines, which allow reducing the energy consumption of the building throughout its useful life.
CONSCIOUS USE OF PLANETARY RESOURCES
The consumption of planetary resources will double by 2060, aggravating the environmental overload of our planet. Continuous demographic growth, the unsustainable global economic system, as well as the demands of the Western standard of living, are some of the reasons that cause this situation.
We therefore find ourselves in a new geological era that is being scientifically accepted under the name Anthropocene, in which humans have come to alter the stability of our planet.
This problem has been extensively addressed by CSIC scientists Antonio and Alicia Valero in various publications focused on alerting about the depletion of planetary resources necessary to ensure the well-being of our society as we know it, but also to address the transition toward a sustainable society model whose energy and raw materials depend on increasingly scarce and dispersed resources. [6]
RESOURCE SUFFICIENCY
The IPCC, in its specific report on the climate impact of buildings, addresses the term resource sufficiency, raising the urgent need to reduce the demand for non-essential materials and resources.
Sufficiency has become a new development paradigm. It aims to meet the needs of human beings, ensuring their physical and mental well-being, but questioning human behaviors and dynamics in order to avoid the demand for materials, energy, land, water, and other natural resources that are not essential to ensure an adequate and sufficient quality of life within planetary boundaries for all inhabitants of this planet in a fair and equitable manner. [7]
It is about remembering that the resources of our planet are limited and our own subsistence is linked to them.
How can we live with dignity within planetary boundaries?
The IPCC proposes a series of standards that direct the architecture sector toward a balance between well-being and a sustainable scenario.
Quality of life standards such as having a shelter to inhabit, having adequate nutrition, basic amenities and comfort conditions, access to the healthcare system, transportation, information, education, and public space.
Sufficiency therefore raises the need to consume the space and available resources of the planet fairly. It is about proposing long-term actions that allow us to optimize and make our ways of inhabiting more flexible, such as prioritizing cohousing over single-family housing, adjusting the size of buildings in order to reduce the demand for resources during the different construction phases, as well as energy demand throughout their useful life. [8]
PLANETARY BOUNDARIES
Scientific researcher Johan Rockström, from the Stockholm Resilience Center, identified in 2009 the processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system. [9]
Following this research, a quantitative measure of planetary boundaries was proposed within which humanity can continue to thrive and develop.
1. Climate change
2. Chemical pollution and release of new entities
3. Ozone layer depletion
4. Atmospheric aerosols
5. Ocean acidification
6. Nitrogen and phosphorus cycle
7. Freshwater consumption and water cycle
8. Land use changes
9. Biodiversity loss and extinctions
According to the recent publication by The Earth Commission, it is estimated that 7 of these systems have exceeded the danger limit: climate change, biodiversity loss, land use, and biogeochemical cycles. [10]
BIBLIOGRAFÍA