Rooms Are Not Neutral

An architect designing a hospital asks about bed count and budget. Ok, that’s a strong simplification, but what I’m getting at is whether the question about how much daylight a patient needs to recover faster gets asked in time or at all.

The answer does exist. Joarder and Price published it in 2013. 100 lux more daylight in a room shortens the hospital stay by an average of 7.3 hours. That’s data from a controlled study.

That number is in a journal and in online publications. But does an architect read them? It’s just one of thousands worth reading. But on its own it helps nobody because it only covers a single variable. A patient room has light, temperature, acoustics, materials, view, spatial proportions. Each of them affects the patient and none of them works in isolation. The research on all of this exists in large volume but has it been brought together for practice?

The Numbers

Patients in rooms with a view of trees need less pain medication than patients looking at a wall. Roger Ulrich researched this back in 1984. His study has been replicated hundreds of times since.

Biophilic design increases cognitive performance by 13.9 percent. Terrapin Bright Green calculated that in 2023. Biophilic means: plants, wood, water and natural patterns in the room. Things the human brain knows from evolution and that the nervous system responds to supportively.

Employees without a window seat sleep 46 minutes less per night than their colleagues by the window. The Human Spaces study measured this in quite some detail. A person gets 46 minutes less sleep because someone drew the floor plan so that their desk ended up away from the window.

If the room temperature is too cool, performance drops by 4 percent. Too warm: minus 6 percent. The range in which a person can work productively is narrow but technically quite feasible.

Why This Doesn’t Reach Practice

The findings are sorted by discipline, not by use case. Lighting research, acoustics, indoor climate: each topic has its own journals. Anyone planning an actual building would need to work through hundreds of publications to find all relevant studies for their project and the different situations.

I dare say that very few do. So buildings continue to be designed for people without knowing what they actually do to the people inside.

The Principle

In an experiment I structured a small section, albeit a very small one, of the existing research in a vector database so that you get a reliable body of data for a specific situation, one that provides concrete statements and therefore answers for those who implement these solutions.

A query would begin with a description of the context: what kind of building, who uses it, for what purpose, the environment, intensity and so on. Then the stimulus: which element of the room to look at, the daylight, the ceiling height, the acoustics, the materials and so on. The system then shows which effect is supported, how strong it is and which study it comes from.

A child responds differently to ceiling height than an adult. A dementia patient responds differently to noise than a healthy visitor. An office worker has different needs than a hotel guest. The answer always depends on context.

Hospital

Daylight shortens the length of stay. Nature views reduce the need for pain medication. Add natural materials that lower cortisol levels and quieter acoustics that improve sleep.

Most of this costs nothing extra. Whether a patient looks out the window at trees or at a wall can be decided by the floor plan or the exterior design.

Office

90 percent of a company’s operating costs are personnel costs. Rent and energy together make up 10 percent. A small improvement in the work environment delivers more than the entire energy savings of an ecologically optimized building.

Ecological building matters. But whether the room temperature is right, whether enough daylight comes in, whether the acoustics are bearable, that determines whether people can work productively and with satisfaction. The feedback I took from many conversations is that these decisions are today mostly made on the basis of an architect’s personal experience but too rarely based on the effect their design should have.

The Question

There is no general recommendation for “the good building.” Biophilic design increases cognitive performance by 13.9 percent on average. But in a classroom for children with ADHD that means something different than in a hotel lobby.

The effect is always specific. The precision of the answer is not in the average values from the studies but in the context, what kind of room is being built, who uses it and what the person does there.