CULTIVATING SPACE   
Lauren Sexton      
How can the design of the classroom support
learning and improve the well-being of students?

I am a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture and have been investigating this question through the lense of neuroscience and design. My study has led to the production of a teacher's manual that offers information, research and strategies for creating enriched learning environments that support the well-being of students. I believe that educators should have easy access to this type of research in a digestible and engaging format and hope the manual I create empowers and inspires teachers to make the most of the resources they have, but also advocate for the importance of the classroom environment on student well-being and success. This spring, I am continuing the research and hope to develop the manual to a level that it can be published. I plan to update this site with weekly posts related to the current research discoveries and questions I am working on. If you are interested in getting in touch, viewing more of my work, or supporting the research by completing a teachers survey, please refer to the links below!


 
link to teacher survey

05 Can Architecture Improve Health?
02.27.25

Can architecture improve health? What impact can nature, light, acoustics, and movement in an indoor environment have on physiology - our body’s biological and physical processes - and how is this relevant to the design of classroom spaces?

In the last post, The Role of the Classroom, I talked about Susan Hrach’s argument for the classroom as a tool or an extension of a student’s peripersonal space to facilitate better learning. Specifically, Hrach refers to the classroom in this context as an affordance, or an object that facilitates engagement with the environment. 
 This week, I was very excited to finally get my hands on a digital copy of Tye Farrow’s Constructing Health 03, which was published towards the end of 2024 and also describes the built environment as an affordance. Tye Farrow is an architect that specializes in the intersection of architecture and neuroscience to create spaces that improve health and well-being. Throughout his newest book, Farrow asks the question, “What if we could construct health?” An analogy he often discusses, which I find both clever and memorable, is that humans consume architecture in the same way we consume food. Like food, architecture is never neutral. It can either improve your health through enriched vitamins and nutrients, serve as empty calories, or even lead to health issues:

“Many buildings can be described as transactional, doing only what is asked of them. Using a food metaphor, this type of building is the equivalent of a fast food hamburger. It is functional and convenient – it solves the immediate problem of filling the void in your stomach, and you do not need a plate, knife, and fork to consume it. The ketchup, mustard, and relish add some visual and gustatory zest, while the lettuce and pickle give a bit of crunch to an otherwise bland and uniform texture. But the meal leaves you feeling tired and empty after an hour as the high sodium levels, sugar, and carbohydrates result in a sudden spike in blood sugar levels, which then plummet again just as quickly. Fast food is transactional food, unlike a nutritionally balanced home-cooked meal or superfoods, which flood the body with enormous amounts of vitamins and minerals.” 03
Farrow Partners / SZMC Helmsley Cancer Center 05
Farrow argues that we should be considering architecture in this way, working to construct spaces that are more than transactional - that act as affordances to “cause health.” Throughout the book, Farrow explores how the physical environment impacts human physiology, the body’s natural response to events or actions - such as heart rate increases during exercise or sweating in the heat. While these physiological responses are universally accepted and understood, it actually wasn't until the mid-1900s that scientists began studying how the environment affects physiology.
circadian rhythm ©Lauren Sexton
 Farrow specifically highlights the effects of light and nature on health. Both natural and well-designed artificial light can support circadian rhythms, the body’s internal clock that regulates sleep, metabolism, and body temperature. The color temperature of light plays a key role, as our bodies associate warm light with nighttime and cool light with daytime. For example, waking up to the natural light streaming through your window is your body’s physiological response to the environment’s cues about the time of day. Additionally, views of nature, plants, and natural materials can have a major impact on health. On this topic, Farrow says:

“Sensory intake from wood- derived olfactory, auditory, tactile, and visual stimulation resulted in a host of physiological benefits. Olfactory stimulation by the scents of pine, cedar, and cypress chips reduced participant blood pressure and cortisol levels, and auditory stimulation from the tapping of wood planks calmed theta and beta waves in the brain, indicating a greater sense of relaxation and calm.” 03

Overall, I found Farrow’s Constructing Health to be a great resource and have much more I could say about it but need to wrap it up! So why does any of this matter to the design of education spaces?
Well, the other two readings I did this week, The Great Indoors 02 and Healthy Buildings 01, reveal the unfortunate reality that humans now spend the majority of their time indoors. Both authors emphasize through statistics, case studies, and analogies just how important it is to consider how buildings are impacting our health because it is no longer a question of if.  In Healthy Buildings, the authors explain that humans spend roughly 90% of their time indoors and by the time a student graduates high school, they will have spent 15,600 hours in a school building. When discussing these statistics, the authors say:

“Finding shelter is one of the most primal human needs, right alongside food and water. But we are long past the time when shelter was a place to return to after a day of foraging—when it meant a roof over our heads and not much more. In that long-gone era, we spent all of our time outdoors. Today, our ‘shelters’ are the places where we live, work, learn, play, rest, and recuperate. Over several millennia, humans have evolved from an outdoor species into an indoor one. Yet despite the fact that buildings are now central to our lives and livelihoods, the quality of the air we breathe inside them is generally an afterthought. Have you ever seen a news story about outdoor air pollution? Yes, of course. Every day. Have you ever read a story about indoor air pollution? Rarely, if ever (at least, not until Covid-19 hit and the world started to appreciate, perhaps for the first time, that indoor spaces were key to the spread of infectious disease). Much more time is spent worrying about outdoor pollution, yet it’s the indoor environment that has the greatest impact on our health.” 01

While Tye Farrow offers salutogenic, or health-promoting, design solutions in his book, a large portion of Healthy Buildings is spent diagnosing the negative side effects buildings can have on health, especially in students. The authors mention that low air quality, uncomfortable temperatures, and poor lighting and acoustics are common across many schools and lead to health conditions, poor performance in school, difficulty with attention, increased absences, and long term impacts on learning. The authors explain that even the people who should understand these impacts the most don’t see the correlation between the classroom environment and student health. They prove this by including a quote from the Former US Secretary of Education in 2018, Betsy DeVos: “We should be funding and investing in students, not in school buildings.”
04
I want to end this post on a positive, and hopefully inspiring note. In The Great Indoors, Emily Anthes also describes the impact the indoor environment can have on health. She specifically focuses on the importance of promoting movement through design. It is true that we have become an indoor species. But the more recent issue is that we have become a sitting species. Anthes argues that if design can encourage movement - whether in the home, offices, public spaces, or schools - it is very directly “causing health” (as Tye Farrow would put it). When discussing the potential of this, Anthes says:

“But if we really want to change health habits, the best time to start is in childhood, and some of the most innovative active design projects focus on our youngest citizens. Kids spend as many as half their waking hours in schools and are sedentary for most of that time; a few small design tweaks could potentially improve the health of hundreds of children in one fell swoop.” 02

She goes on to describe a case study of a primary and elementary school project in Virginia that was led by VMDO Architects. The project sought to improve the health habits and well-being of students through design. The project can be viewed here. 

(p.s. do you spot the Hokki stool?!)

image and reference links

  1. Allen, Joseph G. and Macomber, John D.. Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Can Make You Sick—or Keep You Well. Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2022. 
  2. Anthes, Emily. The Great Indoors: the Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness. New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020
  3. Farrow, Tye. Constructing Health. Aevo UTP, 2024.
  4. https://www.vmdo.com/architecture-blog/investing-in-communities,-transforming-lives-the-story-of-the-buckingham-schools-project/
  5. https://www.canadianarchitect.com/book-review-constructing-health/
YSOA SP25 Independent Study