Beyond sustainability: reconsidering the healing qualities of the built environment

Abstract

Sustainability, resilience and other concepts have recently emerged as a response to the most urgent problems of our time including the ones of the built environment. Throughout the last century little attention if any at all was paid to the adaptability of the built environment to nature and the needs of human beings. The ideology that shaped Modernism was hostile to the psychological qualities of the built environment and instead cared about shaping new aesthetics and advanced technology in building industry. The ascent of Modernism during the last century among other things was associated with dissemination of certain building doctrines and dogmas that neglected environmental issues and played their role in discrediting traditional ways of building architectural structures as well as traditional urbanism. As a result the built environment lost its adaptability to natural environment as well as its human qualities. Thus a new approach to building and rethinking of the legacy of Modernism as well as current practices is urgently needed. Though the rise of environmental consciousness gave an impetus to reconsider present quality of built environment, more steps in this direction are required. Reconsideration of architectural and urban design practices could and should be triggered by the new findings in psychology, neuroscience as well as re-reading of pioneering work in architectural and urban theory done by Christopher Alexander and his co-workers and more recently revisited by Nikos Salingaros. Reasoning that the development of technology in itself can solve the problems of the built environment is deeply flawed and thus should be transcended.