» Back to Press Release

Media Release
Media Contact:
Amanda Yun
Senior Editor / Press Officer
Tel: (65) 64665775, Ext. 446
Email: heyun@wspc.com

New research at the University of Oregon, just published as Naturally Animated Architecture: Using the Movements of the Sun, Wind and Rain to Bring Indoor Spaces and Sustainable Practices to Life, demonstrates how the movements of the sun, wind and rain can be used to improve the well-being of people in buildings at the same time as raising their awareness of sustainable living practices.

Beyond Green Buildings

Over the last two decades architects and engineers have developed approaches to building design that greatly reduce the impact of buildings on the natural environment ("green" buildings) and their human occupants ("healthy" buildings). But these movements focus primarily on new buildings, which benefit only a relatively small number of people compared to the many who could be helped by making existing structures more habitable. Moreover, most people-including many of those responsible for ordering the construction and remodeling of buildings-are not aware of these advances. Many key features of green buildings, such as energy and water conservation, for example, are not immediately noticeable, and as a result, these simple but important practices are significantly underused.

Several leading commentators on sustainable design, including Judith Heerwegan and the late Stephen Kellert, have suggested that in order to have any meaningful impact on the daunting environmental problems we now face, green buildings can no longer simply "do no harm." Rather, they argue that buildings need to actively demonstrate ways of living in harmony with nature. Nute's work suggests that bringing the movements of sunlight, wind and rain indoors could make passive energy-saving features in buildings more obvious to the people who order and occupy them, and so greatly increase their usage.

The Necessity of Nature

A building's primary purpose is to keep the weather out, but most do such an effective job of this that they also inadvertently deprive their occupants of two key requirements for our well-being: nature and change. In the 1950s Donald Hebb's Arousal Theory established that people need a degree of changing sensory stimulation in order to remain fully attentive. And 30 years later, landmark research by health-care designer Roger Ulrich showed that hospital patients in rooms with views of nature had lower stress levels and recovered more quickly than patients whose rooms looked out at a brick wall. Unfortunately, many buildings-especially those in cities-are not blessed with green surroundings. Kevin Nute has been examining ways to overcome this problem using an aspect of nature available everywhere: the weather. Think of rippling sunlight reflecting from water onto the underside of a boat, or the dappled shadows from foliage swaying in a breeze.

When these kinds of natural movements are brought indoors, they were found to reduce heart rates and were less distracting than similar, artificially generated movement. Human subject experiments suggest that seeing live natural movement of this kind in an indoor space may be more beneficial than viewing nature through a window, and could not only help to reduce stress but also improve attention. These findings are consistent with the Attention Restoration Theory proposed by University of Michigan psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, whose work suggests that familiar natural movement patterns of this kind have the capacity to keep us alert without being distracting.

No Substitute for Nature

There are many kinds of recorded natural phenomena available today. We can watch videos of gently rolling ocean waves or fall asleep to the recorded sounds of falling rain. There are even sophisticated software programs that can generate these effects digitally. So why go to the trouble of redesigning buildings to bring these effects indoors? To answer this question, Nute and former University of Oregon graduate student Jeffrey Stattler projected a digital tree shadow onto the wall of a windowless room and tested whether there was any difference in people's responses depending on whether the electronic tree moved with live changes in the wind outside, or according to a computer program. Most people could not tell whether the tree movements were generated by the wind or by computer. But when they believed the movement was wind-generated, their assessments of its beneficial effects were significantly higher in all categories. In other words, indoor sensory change is likely to have a much greater beneficial effect on us when we think it is natural and live. So, unless we are prepared to mislead people, there is no real substitute for using the real thing.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, most people in the United States now spend more than 90% of their lives inside buildings. Features that make us more relaxed and productive in those indoor environments, then, could have significant positive effects on a great many lives. Lighting, heating and cooling those buildings accounts for almost 40% of U.S. energy consumption. The same natural indoor animation effects could also help to reduce that figure by increasing public awareness of passive energy-saving in buildings. In addition to its practical benefits for people and the environment, weather-generated indoor animation also shows us that, while separating us from its extremes, buildings can also reconnect us with nature.

Scannable augmented reality codes embedded in still photographs in the print edition of Naturally Animated Architecture enable more than fifty video and audio clips of natural indoor animation to be accessed using a smart phone. This new mode of architectural monograph, created by the global academic publisher World Scientific, is available in paperback and hardback from WorldScientic.com, and as an eBook from Amazon, Rakuten Kobo and Apple.

This book retails for US$98 / £85 (hardback) and is available via major book retailers. To order or know more about the book visit https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/q0129.

About The Authors

Kevin Nute is a professor of architecture at the University of Oregon, USA. His other books include, Vital: Using the Weather to Bring Buildings and Sustainability to Life (2014), Place, Time and Being in Japanese Architecture (2004), and Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan (1993).

 

 

---

About World Scientific Publishing Co.

World Scientific Publishing is a leading independent publisher of books and journals for the scholarly, research, professional and educational communities. The company publishes about 600 books annually and about 140 journals in various fields. World Scientific collaborates with prestigious organisations like the Nobel Foundation and US National Academies Press to bring high quality academic and professional content to researchers and academics worldwide. To find out more about World Scientific, please visit www.worldscientific.com.