By: Inas Essa

Recently, sustainability has become an overarching theme for many goals in different fields, highlighting the importance of current and future solutions, away from the tunnel vision that has wasted many natural resources and endangered many species on Earth. The concept has more to do with encompassing every living species survival potential on Earth rather than immediate actions that could have an irreversible harmful impact.

Many important concepts have been born to help mitigate the undeniable harmful impact of many years of overconsumption that has swallowed many resources and drained whatever efforts exerted. One of these concepts that has emerged recently is sustainable architecture. At first glance, many would think it is only related to saving environmental resources, but science shows that it could have an undeniable positive impact on mental health.

Known as green architecture, sustainable architecture, or green building, it is architecture constructed in accordance with environmentally friendly principles. The aim is to minimize the negative environmental impact resulting from emission, pollution, and waste of non-environmentally friendly components used in building construction.

It is also designed to ensure that our use of available resources does not cause harmful effects on the possibility of obtaining resources for further applications in the long run. Therefore, it stresses on producing smart designs and using available technologies to prevent harmful effects on the ecosystem and communities.

Environmental benefits could be evident in conserving natural resources and preventing environmental degradation. Economic ones are reducing the amount of money that the building's operators have to spend on water and energy and improving the productivity of those using the facility. Social benefits are mainly about minimalizing the strain on the local infrastructure.

Recently, research on green building has expanded beyond the focus on reducing water and energy usage to how the buildings affect the people living and working within those spaces. Results have been of high importance as they have shown that sustainable or green architecture has a direct effect on our mental health.

A new study was conducted by researchers at Maryland University, USA, to assess the validity of sustainable building design in promoting and increasing mental health and well-being. It also measured how sustainable buildings impact people’s affective and cognitive functioning differently compared to a conventional building. The results showed an increase in participants’ visual engagement, attentional focus, and control processing in sustainable buildings compared to conventional ones.

Researchers mentioned that study results could be explained by cognitive load theory, which is related to the amount of information that working memory can hold at one time, and is consistent with the interpretation of greater focus on the present environment and reduced internal mental processing. This means that the environment created by these sustainable buildings help in increasing mindfulness and result in better engagements of visual systems.

Experts also highlight the benefits of these buildings on reducing illness and absenteeism among workers, increasing workers’ productivity and workplace satisfaction.

In a nutshell, nothing in our environment works on its own; everything is interconnected. By implementing sustainable architecture to benefit the environment and economy, we benefit as well socially and mentally.

Reference

nature.com

nationalgeographic.com/environment

academia.edu/Sustainable architecture

Cognitive Load Theory