Healing Spaces — What a Place Does to the People Inside It

The places where we spend our days shape habits, and those habits can outlast the places themselves. People adapt to their surroundings. In doing so, they also develop ways of living together.

Literature has its own way of studying that relationship. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, for example, asks what someone notices about a life once its surroundings change.

Medicine, psychology and architecture ask some of the same questions by different means. In Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being, physician Esther M. Sternberg looks at the research behind physical and emotional responses to a place.

The practical question is what a designer can do with that knowledge to make a space more supportive of the people who use it.

Space and the Way We Feel

Some places make it easier to settle down. In others, you may feel uneasy before you can put a finger on what is wrong. Sternberg asks where such reactions come from.

• Her argument begins with a reciprocal relationship. We make the places we inhabit, and they help shape us. A place can damage its surroundings and make life harder for its occupants. It can also be made to support both.

The title sounds approachable. Open the book and you find technical vocabulary and detailed accounts of experiments from more than one field.

Architecture, medicine and psychology come together as the author follows the evidence for why an environment might matter.

• A place can also act through memory and association. A sense of refuge may come in part from what a person brings to the room.

A Straightforward Question with Complicated Answers

The number of terms and studies can slow a reader down. The central question is relatively easy to state.

A building that takes the natural environment into account may help the people inside feel more comfortable. Explaining when and why that happens takes a more detailed account of perception and the body.

That difference sets the pace of the book. The subject feels close to ordinary life even when the explanation asks for care.

A Substantial Book

The Korean edition runs to around four hundred pages. Much of its weight comes from research and references, which give it something of the feel of a scholarly study.

The review groups the book’s concerns into three questions:

1. How do spaces affect us?
2. What kinds of places help people feel less stressed or more at ease?
3. How might designers make places more supportive of recovery and well-being?

How the Brain Recognises Faces and Places

The book discusses experiments on how people recognise what they see. It describes how looking at a face and recognising a place can engage different parts of the brain.

For places and buildings, Sternberg discusses areas near the hippocampus involved in processing scenes and finding one’s bearings.

Hearing a Voice and Hearing Music

Speech and music give researchers another way to ask how sound is processed. The work the book describes looks at the parts of a sound that a listener notices and responds to.

Words, rhythm and melody can all affect how a piece of music feels. The book also discusses studies of music in settings where people are recovering.

What Touch and Smell Bring to a Room

A room is also something you touch and smell. Sternberg considers research on how scents, including lavender and lemon, can affect perceived alertness or relaxation under different conditions.

What Happens under Stress?

Hans Selye’s work provides a way into the book’s account of stress. A stress response can help someone meet a challenge. Persistent or excessive stress can take a toll.

A Labyrinth and a Maze Ask Different Things of You

Sternberg distinguishes the single route of a labyrinth from a branching maze, where someone has to choose a route and may come to a dead end.

The book uses that difference to ask what the walker is attending to. Following one path can leave room to slow down. Finding a way out of a maze demands a different kind of attention.

A designer can take that distinction into account when deciding how much guidance, choice or uncertainty a place will give its users.

Meditation, Exercise and the Immune Response

The book also describes research into meditation and measurements of immune function. The discussion looks at possible connections among behaviour, stress and the body.

Exercise raises a related question. Its intensity, timing and the circumstances of the person doing it can all affect what a study finds.

Bringing architecture, psychology and medicine into a single book means asking the reader to move among several kinds of evidence. I found it slow in parts and absorbing in others, especially when a familiar feeling about a room became a question that could be studied.

A reader with some knowledge of one of the three fields may have a particularly useful place to begin.

Book Information

Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being

Author

Esther M. Sternberg

Publication

10 July 2013 (Korean edition)

ISBN13

9788966185788

View the book on YES24

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