Concrete Human

I’ve built houses, founded companies, furnished offices. I made every mistake you can make along the way. Bought expensive furniture because I thought that was the answer. It was never the answer. Atmosphere is what matters. You walk into a room and feel good, you want to be there, you stay. You walk into another room and you have one thought only: get out. That has nothing to do with the desk.

That experience stayed with me. Not as a theoretical question but as a practical problem. I had spent money, invested time, planned spaces, and the result was that I couldn’t work in my own office. The café in the next town worked better. Why?

The search for the answer led me to neuroscience. Not as an academic, but as someone who wanted to understand why spaces do to you what they do. I had professional involvement with psychology and neuroscience, and alongside that, decades of engagement with consciousness. Sri Aurobindo, “The Adventure of Consciousness.” The central insight: consciousness happens inside. A stable inner state makes the outside world less important. But the state is not invulnerable. A room can strengthen it or weaken it. A room can work with you or against you. And most of the time you don’t notice what’s happening.

The science has existed for decades. Office workers with windows sleep 46 minutes longer than those without. Violent crime drops 52 percent in residential buildings with vegetation. Around 100,000 Europeans died in 2012 from indoor air pollution. Every room activates your autonomic nervous system before you consciously register the ceiling height. The data is there. The building industry ignores it.

This is where reports fail. You can read a study and take note. You can read a statistic and nod. But you don’t feel anything. A report informs. It doesn’t confront.

Through a house project, I met an architect. Through him, an idea developed that grew beyond the original occasion. He met Norwegian photographer André Clemetsen at an architecture conference in Oslo. André had an idea: photograph people in poorly designed urban spaces. Make visible what buildings do to people. Not to decorate, but to confront. We said: let’s do it.

That became Concrete Human. An international traveling exhibition. 36 photographs, 22 poems. The first venue is Oslo, May 2026.

Photography that shows spaces is never neutral. What André does is artistically intentional. He captures mood, he stages it. Dorothea Lange did this with poverty in the 1930s. Walker Evans too. Great photography doesn’t show what is. It shows what you would otherwise overlook. The image forces you to look.

My role in the project is concept and strategy, and translating the science. That means I build the bridge between what research knows and what visitors should feel. Four things, in this order. Heavy. Affected. Inspired. Motivated. First the weight, then the possibility.

90 percent of our lives we spend inside buildings. The architecture of those buildings is not neutral. It heals or it harms. That’s not an opinion. It’s measurable. And it gets ignored anyway because the building industry thinks in square meters, in cost per square meter, in return per square meter. The person inside is a usage assumption in a spreadsheet.

Through the project we met Daiana Zamler, who is working on her PhD in architectural psychology, and Ola Elvestuen, Norway’s former climate minister. Different backgrounds. Same unease. That we know what spaces do to people and still build as if we didn’t.

Concrete Human is not a research project and not a policy paper. It’s a visual confrontation. Photographs you can’t ignore. Poems that stay with you after you’ve left the exhibition. The hope is that someone stands in front of one of these images, feels the pressure that the space exerts on the person in it, and starts seeing their own four walls differently.

That’s modest enough. And ambitious enough.

It took me a long time to understand why this subject occupies me so much. It’s not the architecture. It’s the fact that we live in spaces someone else decided for us, without asking how they affect us. And that the science that could answer this question sits in journals nobody reads.

Translating what research knows into something people feel. That’s what I do in this project. Nothing more and nothing less.