When it comes to architectural design, most emphasis is placed on what happens within buildings while occupants are awake, active and being productive as they engage in their wide range of daily human behaviors. But as an architect, you must step back and ask yourself what makes all of this activity and behavior possible for your occupants? What helps them to maintain their proper amount of focus and energy while also being creative and productive as they engage in their daily activities — even down to a physiological level.

Well, a critical and important factor which helps humans to perform optimally is none other than sleep. And where is this mostly carried out? In homes, in hospitals, in hotels and even less obvious places like boarding schools.

While achieving good design in all of these places is important in terms of helping occupants with their everyday wakeful tasks and activities, it is also important for you to know that REM sleep during the night is critically important for your occupants to achieve in order to help make not only their overall health better, but also to maximize their function and outlook for the next day like creativity, productivity and so on.

Quote from Science Daily article entitled Memory Researchers Explain Latest Findings on Improving the Mind:

“REM sleep is important for pulling together all the information we process on a daily basis and turning it into memories we can use later,” said Mednick. “This helps us to understand more about the benefits of sleep and to help people maximize their sleep schedules for optimal productivity in memory retrieval.”

How Might You Design for a Better Night’s Sleep?

When you think about adaptive architecture, you need to engage in the Read more

YOUR CUSTOMIZED HOTEL ROOM

I came upon an interesting post that got me thinking about the future of hotel design — and hospital architecture…

Chris Brogan, a social media expert, describes his ideas in this post: Ideas for Hotels and Hospitality. He merges his knowledge of social networking with making efficient use of time during his hotel stays — his ideas seem to revolve around productivity, comfort and individual preferences.

I’m especially intrigued by the notion of putting your specific hotel preferences into a “system”. That way, your hotel has your customized room ready and waiting to suit your needs. Brogan does a nice job of listing such preferential hotel amenities, but how can we take these ideas a step further — as they relate to architecture?

HOSPITALS HAVE A LOT TO LEARN

Did you know that hotels are sometimes also used for post-operative recovery? It seems that staying in a hotel gives patients certain personalized comforts that a hospital does not. (Notice that I didn’t say cannot.)

Hospital designers can actually learn a lot from Read more