Boring buildings

humans are healthier when they live surrounded by variety or work in well-designed, unique spaces, rather than unattractive, generic ones. Urban policy professor Justin Hollander and architect Ann Sussman review scientific data to help architects and urban planners understand how, exactly, people respond to their built surroundings, particularly at work. People, they argue, function best in intricate settings, not ‘big, blank, boxy offices’. B Indeed, that’s what Colin Ellard, a neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, has found in his work. Five years ago, Ellard became interested in a certain building – the gigantic Whole Foods Market ‘plopped into’ a notoriously textured part of lower Manhattan in New York. Ellard partnered with the Guggenheim Museum to analyze what happens when someone walks out of a tiny neighborhood restaurant and encounters a full city block with nothing but the ‘long, blank facade of the Whole Foods Market’ building.