Traditional buildings: older and wiser?

Traditional buildings with natural material choices can help to keep people healthy, David Humphreys tells Matt Lamy.

In the 1980s a new term appeared in the public lexicon: sick building syndrome (SBS). The idea was that something about a building could cause its occupants to suffer certain symptoms – typically things like headaches, irritations, fatigue, dizziness and nausea.

While a number of possible causes for SBS were put forward – ranging from stress to printer effluent emissions – for traditional building expert David Humphreys the answer is fairly clear: the construction of modern buildings, from design to materials, often simply isn’t conducive to good human health.

“Human beings relate to our environment through our sensory organs – our skin, our ears, our eyes, even the air that we breathe. We’re directly connected to our environment and I think, generally speaking, the more directly connected we are, the better we are for it. We spend probably 90% of our time in buildings, but these days they can be sealed environments where the air is filtered and recycled and the temperature is controlled by things like heat recovery systems,” he says.

While Humphreys says that these modern systems might offer advantages in certain circumstances, they have their downsides too. “If somebody forgets to change the air filter, you’re breathing in rubbish. And if the heat system fails, you can’t necessarily light a fire to warm up or open a window to let in cool air,” he points out.

Perhaps more importantly, warm conditions allied with a lack of air through-flow can then result in the perfect breeding ground for potential pathogens. “If we think of fungi and mould and bacteria, those organisms are always present in the air, but they won’t do anything unless we provide them with the right damp environment in which to grow. Then, to counter them, we load the air with hazardous chemicals from cleaning materials,” he notes. Such chemicals are examples of many man-made substances used in modern buildings that come with significant health issues.

“Any building that had any works done from the 1950s up to the 1980s will probably have asbestos. Then there are all the polychlorinated biphenyls, which are chemicals found in a vast range of products. There is the issue of micro-plastics, which are also present in many products. We just don’t know what the effect of those things are, but they’re in carpets, wallpapers, paints and cleaning products.”

Don’t make ‘em like they used to

The answer, he believes, is a reappraisal of traditional building methods and particularly traditional design and material choices. “Traditional buildings, in my view, allow us to relate to the environment a lot better and they influence our health through the materials they are built with.

“Traditional building approaches generally use things like stone walls, timber floors and natural plasters made of lime, and they have open fireplaces that radiate heat and move air through the building. A traditional building might have carpets, but they would have been made from pure sheep’s wool with natural dyes – not petrochemical-based products.

“Timber floors can be polished and waxed with natural beeswax. You can use materials like cork, bamboo and even linoleum, which benefit from the added advantage of having a natural antibacterial effect. Similarly, people are beginning to realise that if we use brass, copper, silver and zinc for things like door handles and railings, these are also naturally antibacterial in their own right, so we don’t have to spray them with chemicals.”

While many of these steps essentially offer alternatives to potentially hazardous modern materials or practices, Humphreys says the proof of traditional construction’s role in promoting human health extends further back in history. “If we go back and look at what Florence Nightingale did with Dr John Robertson and architect George Goodwin, they started designing Nightingale Wards according to the idea that patients should have plenty of fresh air, lots of daylight coming in and a system where the room is cool but the beds are warm,” he says.

“To achieve that they used big sash windows, where you could open the bottom and open the top to circulate fresh air. Those windows also allowed great amounts of light to come in, which enhanced the patients’ natural circadian rhythm. And the central heating system was in the centre of the ward, which helped to take the chill out of the air, but also encouraged an effective movement of air. There is so much we can learn from that.”

While some in the construction sector might see these traditional approaches as something of a technological regression, there is hope that the sustainability movement could reinvigorate the concepts.

“I have great concerns about modern buildings and what we’re doing with them because we are moving away from the direct connection with traditional materials that are natural, which are great for sustainability. But if you look at the sustainability movement more widely, one of its side effects is that it is getting people to think about waste and if local materials can be used, rather than importing materials from somewhere else. Those types of questions are far more in line with the kind of thinking that was involved with traditional building.”

Although Humphreys describes them as ‘a little esoteric’, there are traditional, if not ancient, design concepts that he believes can have a huge effect on human wellbeing. Feng shui, the Indian building design tradition of Vastu and mathematical concepts like the Fibonacci sequence, Phi and the Golden Ratio all play a role. “I’m sure a lot of people will look at the idea that these concepts could inform healthy building design and think that it’s a bit nuts. But is it?

“When you look at a plant or a flower, you can see the Fibonacci sequence in everything, and it’s the same with our bodies. Our ears, the relationship of the bones in our hands – these are all mathematically predetermined according to the Fibonacci series and the mathematical formula Phi. The human body vibrates to a certain resonance and if you go into a building that has been specifically designed to vibrate at the same resonance, there is an instant relationship. For example, I believe some of the great cathedrals were purposely designed by their builders to have a certain effect on the human body.

“We’ve lost a lot of that knowledge – we don’t even recognise it’s there in most cases – but little remnants of it have carried on over the years and there’s now a big movement of Vastu architecture that is promoting those ancient design traditions.” 

Read more about Vastu architecture at b.link/EA_Vastu

Image credit | Alamy