Human Spaces: Life-Enhancing Designs for Healing, Working, and Living

Human Spaces: Life-Enhancing Designs for Healing, Working, and Living dramatically illustrates an array of designed environments intended to create a better quality of life.

‧ Features a range of projects from an urban hospital's healing garden to a major manufacturing and distribution center.
‧ Includes some of the newest work being built according to criteria that consider the human implications of design.
‧ Presents life-enhancing designs in a variety of projects—health care, corporate, industrial, educational—as well as residential.

The quality of human perception and experience is what guides these designs. Human Spaces is a handsome volume that will inspire design professionals, clients, and the general public alike.

Human culture is fast becoming aware of and dedicated to issues that surround overall health and well-being—mental, physical, and spiritual. Research continues to indicate that environments influence behavior and shape one's actions, thoughts, and emotions. This reawakening of consciousness about quality living is occurring and being translated into an ever-widening array of arenas including the built environment. Architecture is emerging with a new awareness about design, building, and living that connects mind and body and fosters a sense of place and time, and true well being.

Human Spaces: Life-Enhancing Designs for Healing, Working, and Living explores this reawakening through a variety of health care, corporate, industrial, and residential projects that encompass a wide range of scope and scale. Although diverse in type, all the projects presented here have one programmatic goal in common—an acknowledged understanding of and sensitivity to aspects of healing, human interaction, and wellbeing, initiated either by the client or the design firm. From the spiritual connection to the natural world as seen in an urban Healing Garden to the issues of human scale, natural light, and productivity in a large mid-western factory, Human Spaces strives to instruct and inspire a design sensibility that translates into all aspects of daily life.

Barbara Crisp is a partner in the architecture firm of Max Underwood + Barbara Crisp, based in Tempe, Arizona. She holds Bachelor of English, Bachelor of Design Science, and Master of Architecture degrees and is a faculty associate in the School of Architecture at Arizona State University. The focus of her professional design work addresses sensory experience and perception and their relationship to the psychological and physiological aspects of creating environments that support and sustain well-being. Barbara lectures and collaborates in workshops on life-enhancing environments and healing garden design.