What the Room Does to You

From the outside it looked inviting. The shop window beautifully lit, warm colors, I wanted to go in. I hesitated at the door because I did not want the image of harmony from the window to turn out to be an illusion. Because when I enter a shop I usually sense within milliseconds whether I am welcome or not.

In offices, libraries, conference rooms, hotels and also in my bedroom it is the same. Every room does something to me, it supports me or it holds me back. Most of the time I do not notice it consciously, but my body reacts anyway.

For a long time I suspected this was not just imagination and that rooms actually steer how we think, feel and act. Not in a figurative sense but quite concretely and measurably. And the suspicion is correct. There is an entire field of research for this and it is called neuroarchitecture.

Zakaria Djebbara showed at Aalborg University in Denmark that rooms prepare actions neurally before we make a conscious decision. The brain senses the room and activates behavioral patterns. You do not decide on your own how you behave in a room, the room decides with you. Ann Sussman used eye-tracking to demonstrate that we unconsciously scan rooms and respond to visual structures within milliseconds. This is not about what we consciously see but about what happens in us unconsciously and in the nervous system.

And then there is the research on open-plan offices. Hundreds of studies, summarized in systematic reviews, and the result is fairly consistent: open-plan offices worsen concentration, health, satisfaction and performance. In a study by Banbury and Berry, 99 percent of respondents said office noise impaired their concentration. The ironic thing is that open-plan offices are actually built to foster collaboration. But the research shows that the few positive effects on communication are completely consumed by the negative impact on concentration and privacy.

I want to work and cannot concentrate, not because I am undisciplined but because the room is acoustically open, visually restless and offers no zone for focused work. I want to talk to people but the atmosphere is not built for communication because hard surfaces, poor acoustics and missing niches make private conversation impossible.

That is not imagination, that is physiology. Ceiling height affects cognitive processing, light the hormone levels and noise the ability to complete a complex thought. The brain does not distinguish between a threat from an aggressive person and a threat from a room that is too loud, too tight or too restless.

Plantronics introduced four zones in their Swindon office: Communication, Collaboration, Concentration and Contemplation. Each zone is designed for a specific activity and the result was remarkable. The absence rate dropped from 12.7 to 3.5 percent and satisfaction rose from 61 to 85 percent. So it does not always take expensive motivation programs but neurophysiologically thought-through room design.

What surprised me about the research is not that rooms have an effect, I have always sensed that. What surprised me is how little this knowledge is applied. Architects learn structural engineering, material science and building codes, but what a room does to the human nervous system is apparently strongly underrepresented in the curricula.

My suspicion has hardened that most rooms where we work, learn, heal and live are not thoroughly thought through. They are built for budgets, for floor plans, for building regulations. The person who uses the room appears in the planning but their nervous system does not. The research and the evidence are there. What is missing is the translation into practice and someone who explains to architects, developers and companies what significance neuroscience has for the performance of their buildings.