The Secret Life of Buildings: Work (2011) скачать в хорошем качестве

The Secret Life of Buildings: Work (2011)

Back in 2011, I’d been architecture critic for The Times newspaper for almost a decade. A great job. Lucky me. I’d got to visit and report on new buildings all over the world. A decade of economic growth had provided money for enormous financial investment in architecture and the built environment, a boom time, with so-called “world cities” such as New York, Los Angeles, London, Beijing, Melbourne, right down to small towns, gentrifying and building what was then called “iconic” architecture by architects once considered avant-garde, such as Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas. This was contemporary architecture in new forms, new shapes, of new experiences for you and me, the ones who used it. TV director Mike Christie and I came up with the idea of a series for Channel 4/Renegade Pictures about this architecture. By this time, following the 2007-2008 financial crisis (which had in large part been connected to, even caused by, this boom time in property development), doubts about this architecture had begun to take hold, such as the complicity of architects in fuelling property speculation and gentrification around the world, in dubious, unethical working practices in their offices and on building sites. We wanted to look, though, at what this new architecture was doing to us, the ones who used it. Astonishingly, until relatively recently (like, 20 years ago), there was remarkably little understanding about what impact the spaces around us actually had on our bodies and our brains. There was a lot of “gut instinct” in the design of spaces ¬– sunlight lifts the mood, small spaces cause claustrophobia. There was a lot of philosophy, such as phenomenology. But no actual science, no hard proof. Until Fred Gage came along. This pioneer of environmental neuroscience was (I think, don’t sue me) the first person to actually prove that changing something physical outside our bodies changed something physical inside our bodies, in our brains. So that’s what we decided to examine. We took environmental neuroscience and psychology and studied what this new architecture was doing to us. This episode was all about our workplaces. Do open-plan offices help us work better? Why can’t we have work spaces that make us happier? We found time and again that ceding control to the users of buildings was the key. If you want to create “good” spaces, give the people that use them power over what they look and feel like. These days, you can’t escape calls for better mental and physical health, wellbeing and mindfulness; back in 2011, though, these issues were not in the mainstream. This series was a real education for me, and, I hope, for viewers. To meet Professor Gage was a dream; to work with scientists from the Universities of San Diego and Oxford in devising experiments a privilege; and to interview an absolute design hero of mine, Herman Hertzberger – well! Written and presented by Tom Dyckhoff. Directed by Mike Christie.