Wellness, architecture,
and interior design are
increasingly intertwined
as a growing number
of specialists work to raise
awareness of the science
of healthy buildings
for the
Designing
Some aspects of the relationship between
health and architecture are pretty intuitive, even
if often ignored. In the mid-1800s, for example,
British nurse Florence Nightingale revolutionized
healthcare by demanding patients be exposed to
fresh air and sunshine, rather than keeping them
sealed off from nature in dungeon-like wards.
Back then, it may have been little more than
common sense at work. Today, however, we
possess the technology and scientific expertise
to target specific health conditions with specific
design interventions. Those interventions still
are not practiced as often as they are preached,
but healthcare researchers are putting more and
more such tools in the hands of designers.
“When Florence Nightingale was using daylight
to heal patients with things like tuberculosis,
scientists really didn’t understand the biological
underpinnings of what was happening,” says
Ashkaan Fahimipour, PhD, a computational
biologist at the University of Oregon’s Biology
and the Built Environment Center. “Now, we’re
moving beyond basic questions about what
microorganisms are found in buildings to more
complex problems about how those microbes
behave in different types of indoor environments.”
For the last several years, the BioBE Center, as
it’s called, has employed squadrons of graduate
students to crawl about campus collecting
microbial swabs from desks, chairs, floors,
bathroom sinks, and other surfaces. Researchers
there are compiling and synthesizing the data
as part of a long-term effort to understand the
interplay between building design and what
the center’s scientists refer to as the indoor
microbiome. The health implications extend far
beyond obvious concerns like preventing colds
and flus, explains Fahimipour. “We are looking
at things like the ‘education’ of the immune
system early in life, which refers to how microbe
exposure in infants and children impacts things
like allergies later in life.” Antibiotic-resistant
pathogens are another area of intense interest,
he notes. “One of our goals is to understand
how the ways in which we operate buildings like
hospitals impact the probability of coming into
contact with one of these pathogens. Bacteria do
a lot of strange things, like eating up genes from
the environment and incorporating them into their
own genome. So, we have to look at not only
which microorganisms are present in buildings,
but what genes are floating around and how those
might impact clinical usages of antibiotic drugs.”
By Brian J. Barth
i+D — September/October 2018
