MEASI ACADEMY OF ARCHITECTURE

Dissertation Synopsis M.arch – General

STUDENT NAME : S. Lakshana Chandra Sabha Adityan
BATCH : 2017-2019
REG NO. : 311317566010

Healing through Architecture

Introduction:

Aim:
Healing is related to normal or sick person and creating the environment for the same.

Objectives
 To analyse how built for can enhance healing.
 To understand the theory of supportive design for healing process.
 To explore elements of healing architecture.
 To study human psychology during stress.
 To arrive at planning parameters in healing architecture.
 To analyse nature as a natural healer in architecture.

Research question
What are the ways in which built environment reduces the stress and accelerate
healing?

Sub Research question

 Which group of people requires healing?
 What are the basic elements in a health facility to focus on healing?
 What helps in easing the stress?
 What areas of the healing environment should be focused on?
 What are the spatial qualities of a built space that inspire
comfort/compatibility in a person?
 Can an architectural design foster a stronger bond between an individual
and natural environmental settings?
 What is Healing?
“Healing is a state of being marked by a feeling of wholeness resulting from a
willingness to open to truth and forgiveness as part of a journey toward love for self and
others while following our true and purposeful path.”

Who Is a Highly Healthy Person?

The World Health Organization’s Definition of Health
“Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely the
absence of disease or infirmity. The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health
is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion,
political belief, economic, or social condition.”

Difference between healing and curing

Curing is what a physician seeks to offer you. Healing, however, comes from within us.
Healing can be described as a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual process of
coming home.
Even if we're losing ground physically, there's extra-ordinary emotional, mental and spiritual
healing that can go on. One of the most toxic new-age ideas is that we should "keep a
positive attitude." It is much healthier, much more healing, to allow yourself to feel
whatever is coming up in you, and allow yourself to work with that anxiety, depression, grief.
Because, underneath that, if you allow those feelings to come up and express themselves,
then you can find the truly positive way of living in relationship to those feelings.

Healing is required when:

A thought, feeling, or action in an individual or group causes discomfort/ suffering which disrupts
the “true” or “best” path for the person or organization. There is a resulting acknowledgment that
something is broken, incomplete, or not healthy.

Forms of healing:
Healing occurs in multiple dimensions—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, familial,
social, communal, and environmental.
Healing occurs at multiple levels from the micro level, as in cellular wound healing, to the
macro level, as in national and global healing.
Healing originates from within the individual and from external sources (eg, human
healers and God) or substances (eg, herbs and medicines).
Healing is a holistic transformative process; it is personal; it is innate or naturally
occurring; it is multidimensional; and it involves repair and recovery of mind, body, and
spirit.
Hence healing can be broadly classified into three forms:
• At a physical level- with medicines
 • At a psychological level – if there is depression due to the eczema
• At a spiritual level – the spiritual root cause needs to be alleviated by spiritual
remedies
Repair and recovery was first categorized as a consequence of healing. Repair and
recovery of mind, body, and spirit are what differentiates healing from cure. When
people are cured, their disease or disease symptoms are physically eradicated, but they may
or may not repair or recover in other areas. Healing, on the other hand, involves repair and
recovery in all aspects of the physical, psychic and spiritual person: in other words, healing is
concerned with wholeness for the total person.

Consequences of Healing
Healing results in positive change, finding meaning, and the realization of wholeness. These
consequences differentiate healing from cure in that cure may occur without the patient finding
meaning or realizing wholeness of mind-body-spirit. Healing results in positive changes at many
levels, including but not limited to physical health. Improvements in mental, emotional, social, or
spiritual harmony are examples of healing outcomes.

The Mind
The mind basically works through stress response and relaxation. There are many stress
indicators throughout our day which contribute to an unhealthy system. Relaxation
stimulates the brain to heal from the stress.
Most of us are aware of our conscious thoughts and through conscious thought control we can
effect change in our lives. However, this may not lead to permanent change. We need to go deeper
into our subconscious mind to life events that have caused sorrow, anger, guilt, anxiety, resentment,
depression etc. Any signal to us that our lives are not balanced (eg high stress, drinking too much,
eating too much or too little, low self esteem, relationship or communication problems, withdrawal
from others, abusive behaviour etc – even a feeling of lack of fulfilment and lack of peace and joy) is
an indication that there is some thought, or memory within the subconscious mind that needs to be
released and resolved.
Surrounding yourself with positive situations and people may just be the secret to maintaining a
healthy body and stimulating the natural human control center — the mind.

The Five Senses Heal The Body

Stress comes in many forms, emotional stress, chemical stress (nutritional), physical stress,
environmental stress (pollution), money stress (security). Smell, Taste, Touch, Sound, and Sight are
our God given gifts to help heal our bodies. How we use our senses measures the degree of healing
power we have. The senses bring into the brain information or (vibrations) that are then broken down
into signals by the brain to stimulate healing.

Healing is related to only Sick person

Every person needs healing. But creating a healing built form for everyone is not a solution. If a
person stays in a healing environment he will get used to it hence further he will need more healing. A
healthy person can go to temple for spiritual healing and can go to a psychiatrist for mental healing.
Whereas sick person in the hospital needs more care to be healed.
Scope and Limitation
The scope and intention behind the design concept healing through architecture is not a
new way of thinking, but is rather a continuation of earlier assumptions that the
surrounding, daylight, Nature views and access etc., have a healing effect on patients.
Limitation of this research is it focuses on creating a healing environment for
healthcare setups.

Healing environments are those that are designed to promote harmony of mind, body and
spirit. A number of studies have linked the physical environment of hospitals to health outcomes for
patients. They include creating “quieter hospitals that reduce stress and improve sleep outcomes”;
designing “stress-reducing views of nature and other positive distractions”; and access to
natural lighting.
The concept of a built environment is that of a material, spatial, and cultural product of human
labor that combines physical elements and energy in forms for living, working, and playing.

Built Environment has been defined as "the humanitarian-made space in which people live,
work, and recreate on a day-to-day basis." Understanding how our environment not only
physically but also psychologically impacts us is key for designing a built environment that will help
alleviate some of the greatest challenges of people”.

Environmental psychology is defined as the science of people’s relationships to the places in

which they live and work. Both human behavior and the environments within which humans exist
must be examined together to be able to understand how the physical environment impacts the
users. Whether it is individual or group behavior that behavior can only be understood in the context
of the environment in which it occurs. This relationship between person and place is significant since
the majority of our time is spent in the built environment. We live, learn, work, and play within the
built environment. Even when we are outside, we spend a significant amount of time surrounded by
manmade structures. Parks and gardens, although constructed of natural materials, are still
designed and manipulated by the human beings who created them and use them on a daily basis.
The design of a physical place influences the psychological state of the people within that space,
which in turn shapes their attitudes and behavior. The question would be whether or not the
architecture and physical design of a place can support individual’s behaviors and activities and help
create a culture for them that not only revents harm from coming to them but also enhances their
experience in the spaces in which they lead their daily lives.
How can a building improve a person’s recovery from injury and illness? Understanding the
link between the brain and built environment sheds new light on how we design healthcare
facilities, enhance the patient experience and build the evidence-base for human-centred design.
How can architecture heal a physical or mental illness?
However a building itself cannot heal a person’s illness. But it can create a healing environment
that can enhance the process of healing.

How Do We Create Healing Spaces?

We see how living patterns are signs of healthy design solutions in this series of articles about the
influence of patterns on living structures.
An environment that embodies living structure allows us to live life fully. We are encouraged, not
inhibited by architecture. Freed from anxiety and feelings of unease induced by hostile buildings,
spaces, and surfaces, positive our emotions blossom in our subconscious.
A building designed with sufficient attention paid to the natural rhythms of human
neurobiology can result in conscious joy. Think of how the tectonics of the human body, our
physical appearance, can trigger sexual excitement — or not. There are many examples of how
physical form, properly attuned to natural structure that can evoke a human response everywhere
along the continuum of conscious to subconscious emotion (Salingaros, 2015).
Christopher Alexander and others have put considerable effort into cataloguing design patterns that
resonate with and actualize our humanity (Alexander et al., 1977). Living patterns free us from
environmental stresses, which come from an incoherent geometry of objects and spaces.
Architecture’s capacity to protect us from stress liberates us to be more fully human, and keeps us
healthy in the long term.
Living patterns underlay all successfully evolved design solutions. Generations of humans have built
up their surroundings by trial and error; discovered configurations that made them feel healthy, both
physiologically and psychologically. Living patterns arose through the evolution of built form, a long
process of selection arising from thousands of experiments. The choice of a healthy architectural
solution over other possibilities uses feedback to identify a state of increased wellbeing leading to
long-term health. This process is the same as in genetic programming, where “software” evolves after
millions of iterations, with variants continually selected and re-selected so the result performs the
required task optimally (Leitner, 2015).
Most living patterns documented by Alexander in A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977) were
derived from looking at solutions that unify the user within his or her immediate environment. Their
main criterion for selection was the healing experienced when a pattern is successfully applied
to identify useful limits to a design. The mind-set in which this phenomenon is recognized and
appreciated considers human beings interacting with their surroundings strongly enough to affect
their health. A living pattern is meaningless, however, in a mind-set that treats buildings as sculptural
objects that don’t naturally interact with their users or their surroundings.

References
file:///D:/M.%20Arch/III%20Sem/dissertation/Engaging%20Holistic%20Health%20through%20in
teractive%20design%20in%20public%20spa.pdf

https://www.academia.edu/20868257/_HEALING_SPACES_IN_ARCHITECTURE_A_STUDY_THE_E
XPLORES_THE_ABILITY_OF_SPACE_TO_ENHANCE_HEALING_A_DISSERTATION_MARG_INSTITUTE_O
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Healing Architecture Book by Christine Nickl-Weller and Hans Nickl

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ed+design+healthcare&oq=evidence+based+design&gs_l=psy-
ab.1.3.0i20i263k1j0l9.1174.28666.0.31327.24.13.1.9.10.0.315.2321.0j10j2j1.13.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-
ab..1.23.2436.0..35i39k1j0i131k1j0i10k1.0.m6VZ3lfFcbM