Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art

323 Pages·2003·23.4 MB·English

by  Christopher Day

Places
of the
Soul
... one of the seminal architecture books of
recent times.
Professor Tom Wooley,
Architects Journal
The ‘bible’ of many architects and those
interested in architecture.
Centre for Alternative Technology
... an inspiration to all those who care about
the influence of the environment on Man’s
health and well-being.
Barrie May,
The Scientific and Medical Network
At last an architect has written a sensitive
and caring book on the effects of buildings
on all our lives.
Here’s Health
This gentle book offers a route out of the
nightmare of so much callous modern
construction. I was inspired.
Colin Amery, The Financial Times

Places
of the
Soul
Architecture and Environmental
Design as a Healing Art
Second edition
Christopher Day
Architectural Press
An imprint of Elsevier
Linacre House, Jordan Hill, Oxford OX2 8DP
200 Wheeler Road, Burlington MA 01803
First published by The Aquarian Press 1990
Reprinted 1993
Published by Thorsons 1999
Second edition 2004
Copyright © 1990, 1999, 2004, Christopher Day. All rights reserved
The right of Christopher Day to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including
photocopying or storing in any medium by electronic means and whether or not
transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written
permission of the copyright holder except in accordance with the provisions of the
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Day, Christopher, 1942–
Places of the soul: architecture and environmental design
as a healing art. – 2nd ed.
1. Architecture – Psychological aspects 2. Architecture –
Environmental aspects
I. Title
720.4'7
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 0 7506 5901 7
For information on all Architectural Press publications visit our
website at: www.architecturalpress.com
Typeset by Genesis Typesetting Ltd, Rochester, Kent, UK
Printed and bound in Italy
Contents
Foreword by
HRH The Prince of Wales vii
Preface – New millennium:
new issues ix
Acknowledgements xi
Dedication xi
1 Architecture: does it matter? 1
2 Architecture with health-giving
intent 9
3 Architecture as art 31
4 Building for planetary health 37
5 Building for human health 57
6 Qualities and quantities 71
7 Conversation or conflict? 83
8 Space for living in 105
9 Design as a listening process:
creating places with users and
builders 143
10 Ensouling buildings 159
11 Building as a health-giving
process 185
v
s 12 Healing silence: the
t
n architecture of peace 203
e
t
n
o
C 13 Children and environment 217
14 The urban environment 229
Sustainable values,
murban pressures 229
Urban life: urban needs 231
Cities as places 238
Cities for people 248
Cities for life 254
Eco-cities: Utopia or
mpracticality? 274
15 Building for tomorrow 283
List of photographs and
project-related drawings 299
Index 305
vi
ST.
For many years now, I have sought to do what I can to encourage those involved in
design and building to reflect in their work the careful balance and harmony of
Nature, and to seek to restore the lost habitat of our towns and cities, of our
countryside and, indeed, of our very souls to re-integrate what has been dis-
integrated and fragmented. I have also sought to emphasize the dangers of an
obsession with the kind of clinical and mechanical efficiency which seems to me to
remove every last drop of intuitive cultural meaning from our lives and our
surroundings.
Part of the dis-integration which has been identified has laid within the larger vision
or perhaps lack of vision! that some architects and designers have brought (and,
sadly, continue to bring) to their work: the very values that inform their understanding
and practice. And another part would seem to lie in the details of their designs
details of form and space, of colour, light and texture -that make up our experience of
place.
In an age in which some have said that we know ‘the price of everything, but the value
of nothing’, I wonder if architects can really only design with their heads or whether
they can still bring to their work that “angelic” intellect of the heart and the soul? I
wonder, too, if they can draw out for us in the present the best of our traditions, and to
re-introduce those timeless qualities of harmony, human scale and character that
generate a sense of belonging enriching the soul rather than impoverishing it..
These matters have been, and remain, the concern of my Foundation for the Built
Environment. My original aim in setting up my Foundation was to provide a refuge
for those who, like me, were in despair at the wholesale destruction of architectural
and fine art education and who wished to pass on to a new generation the knowledge
of those priceless traditions that, for thousands of years, have provided a link between
successive generations; and to reintroduce the vital human element into the
understanding of the built environment.
It is clear to me, and to many others, that Christopher Day not only shares this
concern, but is also a leading practitioner in this field, and I am pleased to note that he,
too, refers to architecture and environmental design as “a healing art”. For all of us
must surely feel the urgent need to heal the environment that we have so brutally
attacked throughout the course of the 20th Century.
Trying to break a conventional mould is a painful experience, but if we are to create
sustainable and balanced communities, rather than soulless and fragmented ghettoes
condemned by architecture and planning to the margins of life, try we must. I hope
that this book will give those who study it the courage to do so.
Preface
New millennium: new issues
Since 1988, when I wrote Places of the has been urban, addressing this very
Soul (published 1990), the world has issue.
changed. In the 1980s I had to persuade Climate change is no longer just a
clients to include ecological features. probability. It’s already here; all we don’t
Now, sustainability is firmly on the know is how extreme it will become.
public agenda – indeed it’s considered This means that buildings need to be
‘sexy’. (In the 1990s it was gender-free!) climatically robust: cooling, ventilating
Seventy-five per cent of US designers and warming naturally, and shedding
now say their clients want sustainable wind. As buildings account for over
design.1 Over 50 per cent of UK archi- two-thirds of CO production4 and air
2
tects would prioritize it over design conditioning is a major user of ozone-
quality2 – though I’ve never seen why destroying freons, this highlights
these should conflict! Even many high- environmentally responsible building
profile architects like to do occasional issues, also the responsibility each of us
sustainable buildings. (I must look up has towards global climate.
the meaning of ‘intermittently sustain- Globalization brings awareness that
able’!) Rio, Kyoto, Johannesburg and we share – and share responsibility for –
their after-waves have even established it a single world. Culturally, it’s enrich-
on the political agenda – anyway in ingly broadening, but global commerce
words, sometimes even in action.3 also threatens local economy, society,
Many trends then are now realized culture, and even place and personal
facts. Two-thirds of the world’s popula- identity. Products travel globally, but
tion now live in cities. Cities, by their amongst people, ignorance, fear and
nature, depend on ‘somewhere else’ for intolerance bring rifts with alarming
food, energy and water. Sustainable global implications. This makes both
cities are an ever more urgent challenge. diversity as richness and local identity as
Fortuitously, while prior to 1988 most anchor increasingly important.
of my work was rural, since then, most Sick building syndrome is now so
ix