How Architecture Affects Our Thoughts, Mood, and Behavior

Libraries have the power to make you feel smarter. Gyms can make you feel healthier. Airports can make you feel nervous—or excited, depending on how long the security line is that day.

All of these experiences add up over time. And what happens? More than just shaping our mood for the day, they shape who we become.

Whether or not we realize it, architecture is changing our lives every day. It guides our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and beliefs. It affects our health, and it changes what we pay attention to. For example:

• Hospital patients in darker rooms have been shown to use more painkillers, report more stress, and have higher mortality rates.
• Schools with poor space layouts can stunt a child’s cognitive development by 25 percent.
• Sitting in stressful rush hour traffic has been shown to increase rates of nighttime domestic violence by up to 9 percent.

Not exactly how we typically think of our physical spaces.

Normally, we see our space as a backdrop in our lives—scenery, but nothing more. But research makes it clear: Life could be a whole lot better if we saw architecture for what it really is and began designing the world with its true power in mind.

How Architecture Works

Everyone has a stake in bringing better design to the world because it affects every one of us. At home, at work, and throughout daily life, how your surroundings are laid out can nudge you in one direction or another.

For example, you may have heard by now that grocery stores will stock high-margin foods on shelves closer to your eye level (and your child’s eye level), since people usually buy the first item they see. But did you know that grocery stores are also known to play music over the loudspeaker that is set to a tempo that matches your walking speed with a shopping cart? (Generally, it’s pretty uptempo.)

That’s just one example. Architecture's influence is everywhere.

Rooms with lower ceilings have been shown to make you more focused, while rooms with higher ceilings make you more creative. Open-plan offices cause employees to take more sick days. Schools with cleaner air see lower rates of asthma-related absenteeism. Patients talk more openly with their doctors in spaces with walls rather than curtains because they feel more privacy. The list goes on.

While we don’t hold the power to change all of these spaces on our own, the good news is that once you realize the power architecture holds, you can start doing something about it.

How to take action

For the past 20 years, I’ve been cultivating a design philosophy based on this reciprocity between us and our spaces. In Urdu, my native language, there's a word that perfectly encapsulates this: Baaham. It means two things working in conjunction. In this case, it’s that relationship between us and our environment.

The Baaham design approach is a holistic way of design that uses problem-solving, biology, behavior change, sustainability, and systems-level thinking. The goal is to deeply understand what people need from their spaces, how architecture can give them that, and designing places that make people's lives better. Anyone can make their spaces more Baaham—that is, more in line with how they want themselves, and the space, to function.

You can start by asking yourself a simple question: What do I need from this space? Consider how you’ll use the space, and be specific about the details. Walk yourself through a typical day in that space, taking note of what things you need to accomplish there and whether the space helps or hurts those efforts. And consider how you’d like to use the space, or how the space could nudge you toward the behaviors you want.

For example, if you're thinking about redesigning your office, think about the kind of work you do in a typical day or week. Knowing what we know about ceiling height, is your office better suited to creative thinking or focused work? If it has a low ceiling, but you need to brainstorm now and then, try finding a roomier space for those tasks—or go for a walk during that time.

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These kinds of changes may feel small, but they add up to a space that is perfectly designed to suit your needs. This is how architecture works to change your life.

Even in places where you don’t have as much agency, like your grocery store, you can at least be aware of what you need and whether the space is helping you or not. Perhaps you're on a mission to eat healthier, and can be more mindful that the size of the shopping carts or the layout of the store is nudging you to over-buy or spend too much time in aisles full of processed foods. There's great power in knowing what the space is trying to get you to do.

Action starts with awareness

Some places make us feel smarter or healthier, and some places make us miserable. But every place is exerting some influence on us. That's because architecture is the container for our lives. The shape we give to architecture is the shape we give to our lives.

You won’t always be able to redesign your local library or other public spaces, but awareness is the first step. As you start noticing when design is holding you back, you can start to lean in and take control when you see the opportunity, to make it a more Baaham space.

The anthropologist David Graeber said, “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

He’s right. Each of us has a responsibility to ourselves and others to start redesigning how architecture works with us, and make the world a better place. Luckily, we all have a say in this.