Towards anthropotropic architecture : establishing a framework for integrating human flourishing into building design

Today, it is known that the built environment affects people. While effects can be beneficial, they can also put people at risk, particularly in relation to chronic health problems and mental health diseases, such as depression. With chronic illnesses and depression on the rise and most people spending more than 90% of their time inside buildings, the way buildings are designed today might contribute negatively to these conditions, instead of alleviating them. The felt experience of occupants in existing buildings is rarely, if ever, assessed, made sense of, or used to improve the design of future buildings. While health and well-being have become key focuses of the built environment and featured topics in building standards and certification schemes, scholarly articles, and the general press, there is growing evidence that many buildings today do not meet occupant needs, demands, and expectations and that current measures are insufficient to respond to and correct existing deficiencies. Furthermore, a unifying framework for promoting positive human outcomes in the built environment is missing. Efforts and knowledge are dispersed and fragmented, and current practice focuses often on avoiding negative health impacts. This thesis proposes the term Anthropotropic Architecture as a unifying design concept for an architecture that aims to achieve spatial conditions that foster optimal continuing human development, asking an overarching question: How can architecture support human flourishing and how can human flourishing be integrated into building design as a functional objective? This study brings together the dispersed knowledge about the effect of the built environment on human physiology, psychology, and social life. This thesis finds that architecture can influence all three aspects and support human flourishing by creating repeated positive social, psychological, and physiological experiences for building occupants. Based on a review of contemporary approaches to sustainable design practice and the author's experience as an architectural designer, this thesis lays out a design process for developing and integrating human flourishing as a functional objective and continuously improving the design of future buildings to support it. To integrate, develop, and continuously improve human flourishing as a functional objective in building design, this study proposes an integrated design process with robust feedback mechanisms. The proposed feedback mechanisms include Evidence-Based Design databases and design analytics tools that depend on experience-focused Post-Occupancy Evaluation protocols to systematically capture the experience of individual building users as a basis for comparative building analysis and pattern analysis, translating learnings from existing buildings to inform and improve future designs. This thesis proposes "PO(X)E" that can be developed in future research as a protocol to capture occupant experiences in existing buildings. The results from this research can form the basis for future investigations that are outlined at the end of this thesis. This thesis contributes to the advancement of theory in human-oriented building design and provides new grounds for the development of a humane and socially sustainable built environment

Keywords: Engineering.
Advisor: Fischer Martin