Designing for Your Inner Caveman
by Janelle Wolak, Designer
Naked and Afraid
The year is 50,000 BCE. You live on the African savanna. You woke up on the wrong side of the hearth. Your fur wrap isn’t fitting properly, and you keep shrugging it back into place. To compound this annoyance, you forgot your spear back at your hut.
As you amble along picking berries, you suddenly hear wild shrieking behind you. Nervously, you peer through the brush to see a wild pack of rabid hyenas charging towards you. Naturally, they’re hell-bent on eating you for lunch. Naturally, you run like hell.
But where do you run to? Since you’re a human with fully evolved instincts, you run for a refuge on a high point, like a cave on a hilltop.
When you get there, you’re breathing heavily and your adrenaline is still pumping. The hyenas are losing interest. You gaze back at the savanna beneath you, the vast expanse dotted by trees and small lakes, and a calm sets in, the first of your day, the first in a while.
Human Habitats
This feeling of calm and restoration when we look out over open, savanna-like landscapes is universal, an instinct that hasn’t changes for eons. It’s an evolutionary adaptation that increased the likelihood of survival for our nomadic ancestors.
This instinct persists to this day. In one study of artistic preferences, respondents across ten countries uniformly expressed a strong preference for realistic, representative paintings that feature water, trees, plants, large mammals — basically, generic European calendar art. The fact is that, in nature-like settings, patients heal faster, children learn more quickly, and workers are more productive. As a rule, in such environments, we homo sapiens feel less stressed and think more clearly and creatively.
To be sure, humans have the ability to adapt to any kind of natural environment, be it the desert or the Arctic tundra, or one day even Mars. Adaptation is our defining characteristic. But there’s an essential, ingrained part of us that isn’t adaptable at all. Through countless iterations of modernity, this part stubbornly goes on craving views of water, trees, and rolling landscapes. As the evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson puts it: “we have a Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions.” In other words, our emotional needs haven’t changed in millennia.
The Mismatch
The stress hormones that so adeptly redistribute blood flow to our muscles and once saved us from stampeding hyenas are now the bane of our existence: they impede us from finding health and happiness in urban environments. Think about it. We evolved in dispersed familial groups. We certainly didn’t adapt to be crowded together in cell-like apartments that would be considered inhumane for most zoo animals. The sensory overload of cities triggers stress hormones and keeps them in overdrive.
The repercussions are multifold: cities reduce emotional resiliency, lower immunity, suppress memory, increase depression, and double the risk for mental disorders like schizophrenia.
Why, then, do 80% of the Americans live in urban areas? Why do we live in spaces that subjugate our innate, primordial preferences for space and security?
One reason is obvious: urban environments present the most efficient and sustainable way for large human populations to live interactively. We’re lured by the prospect of work and opportunity. The results, however, can be dehumanizing.
Toward an Instinctual Architecture
There’s a solution to the mismatch between our innate emotional needs and our current habitats. Instead of suppressing our instinctual needs for greenery, blue skies, and open landscapes, let’s embrace them. Sustainable architecture is about maximizing efficiency and conserving energy. But the third, equally important leg of this construct needs to be maximizing our connection to nature to nurture our health, mental acuity, and sanity. Let’s make city living sustainable for humans by taking concerted efforts to incorporate natural light, materials, patterns, and views into our designs.
If you can’t go hikes on the weekends or sit in the park on your lunch break, recreate the savanna in your apartment or workplace — to soothe and (properly) stimulate all of your senses. Paint the ceiling blue to emulate the horizon, put in textured hardwood floors to mimic the forest floor, add a small fountain that resembles a trickling brook, or install artificial lighting that simulates natural light and syncs with your circadian rhythms.
If your own human health and happiness isn’t reason enough to bring the outdoors inside, do it for the increased productivity and the bottom line.
