Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body
Author: Sarah Schrank
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2016-07-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 131712345X

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body brings together cutting-edge scholarship examining the myriad ways that architects, urban planners, medical practitioners, and everyday people have applied modern ideas about health and the body to the spaces in which they live, work, and heal. The book’s contributors explore North American and European understandings of the relationship between physical movement, bodily health, technological innovation, medical concepts, natural environments, and architectural settings from the nineteenth century through the heyday of modernist architectural experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s and onward into the 1970s. Not only does the book focus on how professionals have engaged with the architecture of healing and the body, it also explores how urban dwellers have strategized and modified their living environments themselves to create a kind of vernacular modernist architecture of health in their homes, gardens, and backyards. This new work builds upon a growing interdisciplinary field incorporating the urban humanities, geography, architectural history, the history of medicine, and critical visual studies that reflects our current preoccupation with the body and its corresponding therapeutic culture.

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body
Author: Sarah Schrank
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2016-07-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781315586298

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Bodybrings together cutting-edge scholarship examining the myriad ways that architects, urban planners, medical practitioners, and everyday people have applied modern ideas about health and the body to the spaces in which they live, work, and heal. The book's contributors explore North American and European understandings of the relationship between physical movement, bodily health, technological innovation, medical concepts, natural environments, and architectural settings from the nineteenth century through the heyday of modernist architectural experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s and onward into the 1970s. Not only does the book focus on how professionals have engaged with the architecture of healing and the body, it also explores how urban dwellers have strategized and modified their living environments themselves to create a kind of vernacular modernist architecture of health in their homes, gardens, and backyards. This new work builds upon a growing interdisciplinary field incorporating the urban humanities, geography, architectural history, the history of medicine, and critical visual studies that reflects our current preoccupation with the body and its corresponding therapeutic culture.

Nature through a Hospital Window

Nature through a Hospital Window
Author: Shan Jiang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2022-03-10
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 100055239X

Adopting an evidence-based approach, this book uses two state-of-the-art experimental studies to explore nature’s therapeutic benefits in healthcare environments, emphasizing how windows and transparent spaces can strengthen people–nature interactions. High-quality, supportive, and patient-centred healthcare environments are a key priority for healthcare designers worldwide, with ageing populations creating a demand for remodeled and updated facilities. The first study demonstrates individual psychophysiological responses, moods, and preferences in simulated hospital waiting areas with different levels of visual access to nature through windows, while the second experiment uses cutting-edge immersive virtual reality techniques to explore how gardens and nature views impact people’s spatial cognition, wayfinding behaviors, and experience when navigating hospitals. Through these studies and discussions drawing on architectural theory, the book highlights the important benefits of having access to nature from hospital interiors. This concise volume will appeal to academics and designers interested in therapeutic landscapes and healthcare architecture.

Modern Architecture and Climate

Modern Architecture and Climate
Author: Daniel A. Barber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2023-04-11
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0691248656

How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects Modern Architecture and Climate explores how leading architects of the twentieth century incorporated climate-mediating strategies into their designs, and shows how regional approaches to climate adaptability were essential to the development of modern architecture. Focusing on the period surrounding World War II—before fossil-fuel powered air-conditioning became widely available—Daniel Barber brings to light a vibrant and dynamic architectural discussion involving design, materials, and shading systems as means of interior climate control. He looks at projects by well-known architects such as Richard Neutra, Le Corbusier, Lúcio Costa, Mies van der Rohe, and Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and the work of climate-focused architects such as MMM Roberto, Olgyay and Olgyay, and Cliff May. Drawing on the editorial projects of James Marston Fitch, Elizabeth Gordon, and others, he demonstrates how images and diagrams produced by architects helped conceptualize climate knowledge, alongside the work of meteorologists, physicists, engineers, and social scientists. Barber describes how this novel type of environmental media catalyzed new ways of thinking about climate and architectural design. Extensively illustrated with archival material, Modern Architecture and Climate provides global perspectives on modern architecture and its evolving relationship with a changing climate, showcasing designs from Latin America, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and Africa. This timely and important book reconciles the cultural dynamism of architecture with the material realities of ever-increasing carbon emissions from the mechanical cooling systems of buildings and offers a historical foundation for today’s zero-carbon design.

Free and Natural

Free and Natural
Author: Sarah Schrank
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 081229629X

From Naked Juice® to nude yoga, contemporary society is steeped in language that draws a connection from nudity to nature, wellness, and liberation. This branding promotes a "free and natural" lifestyle to mostly white and middle-class Americans intent on protecting their own bodies—and those of society at large—from overwork, environmental toxins, illness, conformity to body standards, and the hyper-sexualization of the consumer economy. How did the naked body come to be associated with "naturalness," and how has this notion influenced American culture? Free and Natural explores the cultural history of nudity and its impact on ideas about the body and the environment from the early twentieth century to the present. Sarah Schrank traces the history of nudity, especially public nudity, across the unusual eras and locations where it thrived—including the California desert, Depression-era collectives, and 1950s suburban nudist communities—as well as the more predictable beaches and resorts. She also highlights the many tensions it produced. For example, the blurry line between wholesome nudity and sexuality became impossible to sustain when confronted by the cultural challenges of the sexual revolution. Many longtime free and natural lifestyle enthusiasts, fatigued by decades of legal battles, retreated to private homes and resorts while the politics of gay rights, sexual liberation, environmentalism, and racial equality of the 1970s inspired a new generation of radical advocates of public nudity. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, Schrank demonstrates, a free and natural lifestyle that started with antimaterialist, back-to-the-land rural retreats had evolved into a billion-dollar wellness marketplace where "Naked™" sells endless products promising natural health, sexual fulfilment, organic food, and hip authenticity. Free and Natural provides an in-depth account of how our bodies have become tethered so closely to modern ideas about nature and identity and yet have been consistently subjected to the excesses of capitalism.

Healing Spaces

Healing Spaces
Author: Esther M. Sternberg MD
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2010-09-30
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 0674256832

“Esther Sternberg is a rare writer—a physician who healed herself...With her scientific expertise and crystal clear prose, she illuminates how intimately the brain and the immune system talk to each other, and how we can use place and space, sunlight and music, to reboot our brains and move from illness to health.”—Gail Sheehy, author of Passages Does the world make you sick? If the distractions and distortions around you, the jarring colors and sounds, could shake up the healing chemistry of your mind, might your surroundings also have the power to heal you? This is the question Esther Sternberg explores in Healing Spaces, a look at the marvelously rich nexus of mind and body, perception and place. Sternberg immerses us in the discoveries that have revealed a complicated working relationship between the senses, the emotions, and the immune system. First among these is the story of the researcher who, in the 1980s, found that hospital patients with a view of nature healed faster than those without. How could a pleasant view speed healing? The author pursues this question through a series of places and situations that explore the neurobiology of the senses. The book shows how a Disney theme park or a Frank Gehry concert hall, a labyrinth or a garden can trigger or reduce stress, induce anxiety or instill peace. If our senses can lead us to a “place of healing,” it is no surprise that our place in nature is of critical importance in Sternberg’s account. The health of the environment is closely linked to personal health. The discoveries this book describes point to possibilities for designing hospitals, communities, and neighborhoods that promote healing and health for all.

Handbook of Research on Methodologies for Design and Production Practices in Interior Architecture

Handbook of Research on Methodologies for Design and Production Practices in Interior Architecture
Author: Garip, Ervin
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 534
Release: 2020-11-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1799872564

Studio environments can be defined as multi-dimensional integrated production spaces where basic design trainings take place and where design issues including theoretical notions such as sociological, political, phenomenological, and other dimensions are discussed. Present approaches within the literature and social media on this topic gives cause for students to evaluate their future professions over finished and pictorial products rather than ontological and processual means. While there are many resources available on the present approaches of aesthetics and visuality of interior spaces, there is not much research available on new design methodologies, related design processes, and new applied methods in interior arcitecture. Based on different contexts, these methods of design practice have the potential to enrich design processes and create multiple discussion platforms within project studios as well as other design media. These different representations and narration methods for research in the context of interior architecture can be effectively used in design processes. The Handbook of Research on Methodologies for Design and Production Practices in Interior Architecture proposes new design methodologies and related design processes and introduces new applied method approaches while presenting alternative methods that have been used within design studios in the field of interior architecture. The chapters deal with four major sections: the design process and interdiciplinary approaches; then scenario development and content; followed by material, texture, and atmosphere; and concluding with new approaches to design. While highlighting topics such as spatial perception, design strategies, architectural atmosphere, and design-thinking, this book is of interest to architects, interior designers, practitioners, stakeholders, researchers, academicians, and students looking for advanced research on the new design metholodologies and processes for interior architecture.

The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture

The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture
Author: Julie Zook
Publisher: UCL Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1800080883

The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture addresses hospital architecture as a set of interlocked, overlapping spatial and social conditions. It identifies ways that planned-for and latent functions of hospital spaces work jointly to produce desired outcomes such as greater patient safety, increased scope for care provider communication and more intelligible corridors. By advancing space syntax theory and methods, the volume brings together emerging research on hospital environments. Opening with a description of hospital architecture that emphasizes everyday relations, the sequence of chapters takes an unusually comprehensive view that pairs spaces and occupants in hospitals: the patient room and its intervisibility with adjacent spaces, care teams and on-ward support for their work and the intelligibility of public circulation spaces for visitors. The final chapter moves outside the hospital to describe the current healthcare crisis of the global pandemic as it reveals how healthcare institutions must evolve to be adaptable in entirely new ways. Reflective essays by practicing designers follow each chapter, bringing perspectives from professional practice into the discussion. The Covert Life of Hospital Architecture makes the case that latent dimensions of space as experienced have a surprisingly strong link to measurable outcomes, providing new insights into how to better design hospitals through principles that have been tested empirically. It will become a reference for healthcare planners, designers, architects and administrators, as well as for readers from sociology, psychology and other areas of the social sciences.

Designing Transformation

Designing Transformation
Author: Elana Shapira
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2021-07-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350172294

Jewish designers and architects played a key role in shaping the interwar architecture of Central Europe, and in the respective countries where they settled following the Nazi's rise to power. This book explores how Jewish architects and patrons influenced and reformed the design of towns and cities through commercial buildings, urban landscaping and other material culture. It also examines how modern identities evolved in the context of migration, commercial and professional networks, and in relation to the conflict between nationalist ideologies and international aspirations in Central Europe and beyond. Pointing to the production within cultural platforms shared by Jews and Christians, the book's research sheds new light on the importance of integrating Jews into Central European design and aesthetic history. Leading historians, curators, archivists and architects present their critical analyses further to 'design' the past and push forward a transformation in the historical consciousness of Central Europe. By reconsidering the seminal role of Central European émigré and exiled architects and designers in shaping today's global design cultures, this book further strengthens humanistic, progressive and pluralistic cultural trends in Europe today.