DESIGN PHILOSOPHY AND THINKING
Hades – a ‘home from hell’ Ultimately, home can become ‘Hades’ (Fig 4); not ‘Utopia’, but ‘Dystopia’ – a place of anxiety, distress, extreme sadness, and grief. At its worst it can be an unsafe place, generating feelings of fear and entrapment, escalating into forms of physical/mental harm and abuse to others and oneself.
Multigenerational living So, who might inhabit a traditional home? Multigenerational homes are expected to become more common in the next decade, with grandparents, parents, and children, living under one roof, with supportive benefits, and indeed respectively experiencing diverse problems. From the reality of the individual exigencies of new-born infants, teenagers, adolescents, young adults, and middle- aged couples, to a longer-living population of grandparents, all will exhibit variations in sociability, attention, mood, and mental neurodiversity.
Proxemics
Key to mental health is understanding our own personal space, and interactive dialogue with other spaces and related interpersonal communication. In 1963 Edward T Hall, an anthropologist, defined ’Proxemics’ as a hypothesis describing distinct interpersonal spaces or ‘bubbles’ – dubbed ‘intimate spaces’, ‘personal spaces’, ‘social spaces’, and ‘public spaces’. Most people value their personal spaces, and feel discomfort, anxiety, and distress, when these are encroached upon. Relative distances between people are key in defining engagement levels, i.e. intimate distances for embracing, touching, and whispering. Also to consider are personal distances for friends and family interaction, social distances for acquaintance dialogue, and public distance for community engagement.
Domestic spaces
The spaces within a traditional home are the bedroom, bathroom/WC, kitchen, dining room, living room, and interconnecting spaces. Permutations will evolve to adjust to evolving and changing domestic demographic needs. Each space defines a set of fundamental activities related to sleep, washing, eating/drinking, and leisure/relaxation. These activities will relate to social interaction in the
caravans or indeed cars on drives. In contrast, the teenager/adolescent will ‘chill out’ and find solace in the bastion that is the impregnable bedroom. Tomorrow, one of these decompression spaces may be your electric car parked in the living room.
Figure 4: Ultimately, home can become ‘Hades’ – not ‘Utopia’, but ‘Dystopia’.
living/dining room, and self-awareness in the bathroom, to intimate exchanges in the bedroom.
‘The poetics of space’ Gaston Bachelard, in his classic book, The Poetics of Space, makes a valuable observation, when he says: ‘The house is the quintessential phenomenological object, the place in which the personal experience reaches its epitome.’ He states that the home ‘has both unity and complexity’, being made of memories and experiences. Homes and rooms, cellars and attics, drawer chests and wardrobes, nests and shells, nooks and corners; no space is too vast or small to be filled by our thoughts and reveries.
Decompression spaces
Many homes experience volatile ‘pressure cooker’ scenarios, ‘flashpoint’ moments, and emotional outbursts, etc. The design and planning of the home should enable individuals to freely retire to multiple de- escalation spaces (Fig 5). Many schools, nurseries, and ‘rehab’ centres indeed offer calming rooms for withdrawal, with the aim of de-escalating from a current emotional state within a safe space. Every home should be designed and planned to adapt and flex to incorporate a variation of personal, decompression, de-escalation, ‘safety valve’ type spaces, where one can freely withdraw from the noisy hubbub of daily life, or simply away from others and related situations. These spaces can offer quiet moments of reflection and contemplation, or just simple distraction. Traditionally, these spaces are the study, lounge, workshop, potting shed, basement, games room, ‘Man cave’, shed, and the attic. Many are liminal, neutral, inside/outside spaces such as verandas, porches, balconies, gazebos, and terraces. On the other hand, children, though told to ‘sit on the step’, or ‘stand in the corner’, like to inhabit unusual spaces – such as tree houses, hideouts, spaces under stairs and tables, within cupboards, and at times
Permeability vs. containment These facets of design are fundamental features of overall mental health design within internal and external spaces. Essentially, these principles are based on the simple, almost prehistoric, need to be in a safe and secure space, with ‘look out’ opportunities involving both short and long views (Fig 6). Many neuro-diverse profiles, such as those common in children, young people, and those with autistic disorders, need to inhabit spaces that offer alternative visual dialogue with adjacent spaces and opportunities of escape. Severe feelings of containment can escalate into ‘fight and flight’ flashpoints.
A true example of a domestic design that embraces these features is the Adolf Loos – ‘Muller House’ in Prague – not conceived in plans, but ‘spaces’ developed in spatial design terminology known as ‘Raumplan’. The key topic of ‘prospect and refuge’ theory can, meanwhile, be usefully reviewed in Jay Appleton’s book, The Experience of Landscape, when she discusses how people are inherently drawn to environments that allow us to see without being seen. Meanwhile Richard Layard, in his book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, supports Jay Appleton’s theory that a sense of ‘feeling safe’ is one of the key facets as in happiness and wellbeing.
Biophilic design
Biophilic design (Fig 7) is an innovative and rapidly growing method of designing our living spaces. Edward Wilson, a Harvard biologist, first used the term in his book, Biophilia, in 1984, describing our genetic predisposition toward nature. Essentially the natural world – from which we originate – falls into two categories: ‘Living nature’, encompassing varieties of fauna and flora, and non-living ‘abiotic nature’, which includes water, sunlight, temperature, soil, and the oxygen we breathe. Edward Wilson stated that the most significant positive effects of biophilia could be seen in healthcare applications to ameliorate mental health and physical wellbeing. Physical environments have a fundamental, pivotal impact on our state of ‘wellness’.
Recent research supports measurable, positive outcomes of biophilic design on health. Biophilic design can clearly improve
Figure 5: The design and planning of the home should enable individuals to freely retire to multiple de-escalation spaces.
THE NETWORK | OCTOBER 2019
Every home should be designed and planned to adapt and flex to incorporate a variation of personal, decompression, de-escalation, ‘safety valve’ type spaces, where one can freely withdraw from the noisy hubbub of daily life
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