People, Planet, Design: A Practical Guide to Realizing Architecture’s Potential

By Corey Squire

If you were asked to close your eyes and envision where you are happiest, would you picture somewhere inside a building? North Americans are inside buildings for more than 90% of the day. Meanwhile, the indoors are stifling us, sometimes even killing us. Buildings, and the materials that make them up, expose us to materials linked to negative health impacts. The construction and operation of buildings is responsible for 40% of climate-changing carbon emissions. 

In the US, the design choices made by the typical architecture firm employee each year can reduce emissions by about 300 times that of an average American. But the promise of sustainable architecture will not be realized if sustainability remains a secondary consideration for architects. What if great design were defined by its ability to cool the planet, heal communities, enhance ecological functioning, and advance justice?

In People, Planet, Design, architect Corey Squire builds the case, provides the data, and lays out the practical tools for a transformative human-centered architecture. This approach integrates beauty and delight with an awareness of how every design choice impacts the community, the planet, and the people who will use the building. Outcome-focused with a deep dive into practical design strategies, the book showcases ten building systems that embody design excellence.

Squire centers the idea that by focusing on the desired outcomes—that buildings shelter us from the elements without disconnecting us from the world, that buildings provide the quality of air, light, and views we now know to be essential to health, productivity, and joy—we can move beyond the checklist mentality that has captured much of the design community.

Essential reading for architects who want to transform what the profession means, People, Planet, Design pioneers a new vision and sets readers up with clear guidance on implementing it. Only when design prioritizes people, as it should, can architecture realize its full potential.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642832662

Book preview

Part I

Theory

Chapter 1

Form and Function

The important thing about architecture is that it relates to everything. Buildings serve as a backdrop for our lives, not just as a neutral stage set but as active players in the project of human progress. Architecture is how society tells its story. While art might seek an ideal, the built environment demonstrates reality, telling the story of a civilization in its totality by signaling what’s important, who has value, and how a society functions. For as long as buildings have been around, they have leveraged available technology to provide for people’s needs while embodying the values and aspirations of the cultures that designed and built them. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the interests and passions of the architectural profession had diverged from the interests of the public. New buildings that seemed disconnected from everyday human concerns and did not address society’s needs swung at but missed the spirit of the day while undermining and miscommunicating architecture’s potential.

No single cause is entirely responsible for this schism, but cheap energy coupled with technological optimism helped disconnect architectural design from the concerns of those who use or inhabit buildings. As a long string of inventions including air conditioning, electric lighting, synthetic materials, and even window film promised to solve the problems that were traditionally addressed by design, the public came to see technology as a magic bullet. At the same time, design awards and industry magazines focused on image over impact, creating bad incentives and leading architecture to become bogged down by insignificant details or meaningless aims. All the while, as society faced ever-larger questions and crises, spanning from climate change to income inequality, architecture was not seen as part of the solution.

From the general public’s perspective, architecture exists in a realm completely separate from most people’s everyday lives. Exposure to architecture in the press and media tends to cover public works more focused on impressing other architects than serving the public good. Often the angle is spectacular new forms, as was the case with the World Trade Center Metro Hub by Santiago Calatrava. Otherwise, the angle is sensational, with claims about how the city of the future will be 3D printed or connected with driverless cars, even though these hyped innovations do not address any actual problem that society is facing. Beyond the top-line stories of extravagance, the way that the public most frequently engages with architecture is through styles. Most people can identify a Tudor or a Colonial, and to many, architecture is a collection of ornamental features that distinguish a Georgian from a Craftsman from a Greek Revival. The result is that the public discourse on architecture is no deeper than a building’s exterior cladding.

In early 2020, when the Trump administration proposed an executive order mandating new federal buildings be designed to appear Classical, the pushback from the media and political class was entirely through the lens of style. To a casual bystander, it would seem that the inclusion or lack of fluted columns is what determines the quality of a building and the idea that buildings could serve a more significant civic role never came up. Modernist architecture is ugly and based on the egos of elitist architects was the political right’s cartoon argument in favor of the resolution. The response from the left typically pointed out that only fascist societies legally mandate a particular artistic expression. Below the surface, both sides of the political divide seemed to agree that buildings are blank canvases and what matters is their outward appearance. Few thought to propose that federal buildings could be mandated to generate value for the occupants or community through outcomes such as a healthy work environment or support for local habitat, all while remaining column-capital-neutral. The fact that everyone who partook in this conversation missed this point—that buildings are functional objects with the potential to do good—is the result of architecture’s long slide into the wilderness, the loss of the profession’s ability to recognize and communicate its relevance.

The situation is only minimally better within the architecture community, where the discussions around design are different but too often similarly misplaced. Here, esoteric concerns such as transparency or dynamism tend to crowd out real-world outcomes such as comfort or pollution. Many architects readily accept excessive glare and thermal discomfort for the sake of conceptual transparency through the use of unnecessarily large expanses of glass. Rather than this Faustian bargain being called out by peers as a harmful design flaw, many subpar projects are lauded. Their openness is admired from afar via photographs, and harmful designs are recognized with awards by those who never occupied the space adjacent to the western facade on a summer afternoon.

An example is the San Francisco Federal Building, completed in 2007, an ambitious project with energy reduction, health, and productivity goals that didn’t apply any strategies that would lead to the architect’s stated outcomes. Continuous south-facing glazing with no solar protection other than a perforated scrim resulted in near-continuous glare at the southern workstations, among other less-than-ideal outcomes. Another example is Chicago’s Aqua Tower, completed in 2009. The building’s stunning geometric form glows like a radiator in the winter night as heat escapes through the thermal bridge at every floor slab. In this case, excess energy use, and thus unnecessary air pollution, was accepted for the sake of an interesting shape. It is said that when the design team first imagined this expressive form, they assumed that thermal breaks in the slab between indoors and outdoors would let them reduce the negative impacts inherent in this form, but when time came to cut costs, the thermal breaks were deleted and the form lived on. In both this case and that of the San Francisco Federal Building, the architect decided to prioritize formal expression without the strategies necessary to make it work for people.

Although the Aqua Tower and San Francisco Federal Building both missed opportunities to demonstrate architecture’s potential for positive impact by choosing image over outcomes, the height of irresponsibility might be the Parco della Musica by Renzo Piano Architects, a beautiful performing art center in Rome completed in 2002. To pay homage to the traditional materials of the ancient city, the project was conceived as a composition of thin red bricks, travertine flooring, and hammered lead (lead!) roofs to cover the three performance spaces. The poetry of the material palette and the project’s deference to the historic context is the stuff of great architectural theory, but the roof is literally toxic. Rain, which is naturally slightly acidic, leaches material from those panels and washes lead into nearby soil and waterways, where it accumulates. In 2019, another building with a lead roof, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, caught fire, with the resulting smoke plume littering the city center’s parks and playgrounds with toxic ash. We can’t fault the tenth-century Parisians for their material selection because they didn’t yet understand the full health implications of various metals, but for an architect practicing in the twenty-first century to place material honesty over human health is an indication of how adrift some corners of the profession had become. The Romans also used lead for wine goblets and plumbing, but there would have been an appropriate level of concern if the Parco’s concession stand served chianti in a leaded chalice.

By elevating concepts such as transparency, dynamic form, or material honesty to the status of accepted value, architects devote energy and resources toward achieving outcomes that in the end either don’t matter or can cause unnecessary harm.

In the interwar period, artist Marcel Duchamp railed against the concept of retinal art, which he defined as art produced purely for the eyes. By the twenty-first century, the idea of architectural design being purely retinal has become an accepted fact in some corners of the industry. The opposite of retinal art is art that engages the mind, and this idea led to the Dada, Modern, and Contemporary movements. The resulting work was profound, but a movement in the art world is inherently limited in real-world impact because of its small scale and minimal interaction with the population. Architecture is different. Its scale and ubiquity lead to a much greater impact, both positive and negative. The opposite of retinal architecture is architecture that engages the eyes and mind but also the heart, the lungs, the forests, and the atmosphere. This is the architecture that can rise to the moment and reconnect design with the outcomes that matter most.

The Built Environment’s Inherent Relevance

Before design can begin to address big problems, it’s necessary to first establish the degree to which architecture is a relevant force in people’s day-to-day lives. This claim of relevancy is not at all evident when viewed through the lens of architecture as style or architecture as poetry but crystal clear when the lens through which we view architectural design shifts toward outcomes. Architecture’s relevance is based on three key features: ubiquity, scale, and, most significantly, impact.

Architecture, in one form or another, is everywhere, comprising our entire physical environment. North Americans spend over 90 percent of their lives in buildings, with most of the remaining 10 percent in either a car or designed outdoor spaces.¹ With the possible exception of being far off in a remote part of the natural world, most people move through their lives entirely in spaces that were intentionally designed. In addition, architecture exists on an enormous scale unmatched by practically any other human endeavor. The material resources, economic capital, and brain power needed to design and construct the built environment are enormous. The construction sector accounts for 13 percent of global gross domestic product and 7 percent of the global workforce, with buildings responsible for 36 percent of the world’s final energy use and 39 percent of carbon emissions.²,³ Above all, architecture’s relevance derives from its impact. Based on its scale, intensity, and reach, it’s easy to see how decisions made with the pen can be mightier than those made with the backhoe. After all, it’s the pen that controls the backhoe as well as the light coming through windows, the impurities in the air, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When we look at design through the lens of its real impact on people’s lives, it’s clear that architecture is not only relevant but deeply impactful.

Each morning, we wake up in a space that was designed, a bedroom, and based on the room’s properties, we might feel rested or groggy, ready to face the day or already looking for the first opportunity to doze off. The quality and quantity of light, the attenuation of sound, and the purity of the air are just a few of the environmental conditions that result from someone’s design decisions. All of these factors affect sleep, which then affects our mood, relationships, ambitions, and health. With these compounding impacts in mind, the bedroom can be elevated conceptually from a place that holds a bed to a space that holds deep potential to foster human thriving.

During our waking hours, the built environment continues to affect everything from the quality of the water we drink to the chemicals that come into contact with our skin. Architecture influences what we see, hear, and smell, where we live and how we travel, our success at work or school, and even the balance of stress and reward hormones in our bodies. An example is the concentration of carbon dioxide in our schools and offices; a single, invisible factor significantly impacts our memory, alertness, and mental and emotional functioning. The factors determining CO2 concentration in buildings include fan speed, damper size, run schedules, and operable windows. Each of these factors is designed, and these decisions affect the minds of those who spend time in the space. Furthermore, a simple action can lead to a causal loop and perpetuate itself: The architect or engineer whose decisions lead to poor air quality in one building might themselves be suffering from poor air quality in their own work space due to another designer’s oversight or bad choices. In contrast, the creative genius in the inspirational environment might go on to design an even more inspirational environment for others. Similar examples of impacts and causal loops could be illustrated for many other aspects of the indoor environment, including thermal comfort, light quality, contact with nature, or the presence of environmental toxins. Each time the story would be the same—the well-being of building occupants is a tangible outcome of