Jonas Salk claimed that it wasn’t until he left his basement lab in the States and went to clear his head in a monastery in Assisi that he became able to solve the puzzle of polio. He thought that Assisi’s colonnaded walks, serene architecture and hillside views had provided the right mental conditions for the necessary creative and intellectual leap. This story is from the April edition of Scientific American, in an article on neuroscience by Emily Anthes titled “How Room Designs Affect Your Work and Mood.” Salk was so certain of the effect of Assisi’s architecture on his work that he later hired Louis Kahn to build the now famous Salk Institute (photos below), and the influence of Assisi is clearly visible – the simple, harmonious colonnades, the long vistas, the pale buttery colour of the stone. Some of the scientific findings in the article confirm what we might already have guessed, while others are more surprising. Lighter, brighter spaces with full-spectrum lighting increase alertness and help guard against depression and, later in life, against cognitive decline. Conversely, rooms intended mainly for relaxation should feature darker colours, dimmer lighting, fewer sharp edges on furniture and bookshelves (these activate the part of the brain that alerts us to danger), and more carpeting. Lower ceilings improve performance in detail-oriented tasks, whereas high ceilings encourage abstract creative thought. Views of nature, particularly distant trees and green space, are proven to significantly aid in creativity, concentration and memory (and in combatting ADD in children). It’s worth reading the whole article (click below).

It seems obvious that architecture would affect human behaviour and capabilities, and it’s exasperating that in the West we so often have to reinvent the wheel, usually by employing science to restore such knowledge – in this case architectural and kinaesthetic knowledge – that has been developed over centuries and even millennia in other places. I’m thinking of the carefully worked-out design of monasteries and churches as places that generate inspiration and contemplation for example, or the genius of  Japanese house design. But if we have to reinvent the wheel, then I guess we have to reinvent the wheel. In the 60s and 70s the field of environmental psychology made a lot of headway in this area, and now after a long lull, interest in the effect of architectural design on human behaviour seems to be on the rise again. The BC Cancer research building in Vancouver was built with these ideas in mind.

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Ada Lovelace Day is an international blogging event instituted to draw attention to women who excel in the area of technology. Who is Ada Lovelace? From here:

Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.

See also the Wikipedia entry, where we discovered Lovelace was also, oddly, the only legitimate child of the poet Byron. On Ada Lovelace Day, bloggers are asked to write about a present-day woman in technology. Since this is a design blog and not a tech blog, I’m going to arbitrarily include architecture and design under technology, since they are technical fields. As in other technical fields, woman have excelled in architecture and design but have had a very tough time gaining recognition thanks to the fact that these fields have been extremely male-dominated. When Charlotte Perriand asked Corbusier for a job, he said “We don’t embroider cushions here.” Perriand convinced him to hire her anyway, and went on to become an important figure in design whose star is now rising long after her death. (By the way there is nothing inferior about embroidering cushions, and the textile arts ought to be angry about that remark.) Recent evidence shows that women need female role models much more than men need male role models, and that is why this blog is jumping into the fray. Please also see previous posts on Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, Nanna Ditzel, and many other women designers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Charlotte Perriand:

Eileen Gray:

And finally, I love this recent Annie Liebowitz photo of SANAA architect Kazuyo Sejima holding a model of her New Museum design:

The new building for the BC Cancer Agency is a good addition to Broadway, one of Vancouver’s most ridiculously unattractive streets. The building’s most obvious feature is its round windows which are meant to reference the glass petri dishes used in cancer research. And they’re functional – you can actually open the window in your workspace and the glass ventilation shutters direct air flow. The beautiful 15-storey spiral staircase is designed to resemble DNA’s double helix structure, and the cover of the building’s roof deck is shaped like an amoeba. This type of clever thematic allusion can be very tiresome (remember postmodernism) but here it’s subtle enough that it’s not gimmicky. More importantly, it’s an award-winning green building. As a recent Treehugger article on the building pointed out, it’s water efficient, including the use of waterless urinals, a quarter of the construction and finishing materials were from recycled sources and are low-VOC, and the  building is energy-efficient and clean in myriad other ways. It’s not surprising that it won a LEED Canada Gold rating. The overall building shape is a little ordinary, perhaps, but the windows really carry it, both close up and from a distance. But the main idea was to create a healthy and creative environment for the researchers who work there. And they seem to like it. Top photo by slightly-less-random; below by Ruth and Dave, jmv and sabel on flickr.

More information from canadianarchitect, and click below for more.

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Cynthia Maxwell, who is not only a mechanical engineer who has just finished a PhD on “Sound Synthesis from Shape-Changing Geometric Models” at Berkeley and has been part of the audio group at Apple and has worked for NASA, she also has a great eye and a sense of humour. Her blog, on her website House of Bits (she’s in computer science so that’s apparently a double entendre) is called Some Bits: a decent way to waste time) and it’s an interesting and informed compendium of design – fashion, interior, graphic, architectural and many others. She is obviously busy. How did she have time to find things we hadn’t?

Aladdin chairs by Claesson Koivisto Rune; Casa en los Tuliperos, Chile, by architect Gonzalo Mardones Viviani;  knitwear by Tim Ryan; sideboard by Formstelle; Chinese porcelain crumpled beer cans; meh flask. And if you want to know what’s in her personal cacti collection… here.

Somebody is bound to steal these digital images for textile design… Today’s announcement of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry honours the work of 3 scientists, 2 American and 1 Japanese, for their work in exploiting the luminosity of jellyfish for medical purposes. Using genes that produce luminescent proteins, they were able to tag cells in the body to aid in brain and cancer research. 

 egosumdaniel explains how it works:

The photo above shows the brain stem of a transgenic mouse that has been modified using an exciting new technique called Brainbow. The mouse has been modified to express 4 different fluorescent proteins randomly in different neurons. 

Much like pixels make many different colors possible on your screen, the different random combinations of green, red, cyan and orange fluorescent proteins make it possible to color individual neurons in nearly 100 different hues. You never know from the beginning which color every individual neuron is going to get, but with a choice of nearly 100 different possibilities chances are you’re going to observe every individual neuron glow in a different hue, making it possible to chart complex neuronal pathways… [The brain is] simply going to glow in the dark.

More here.