Boulder, CO – March 2, 2012 – (RealEstateRama) — A study recently completed by PatternMapping® institute, with the University of Colorado Civil Environmental and Architectural Engineering Department, has developed a tool that opens the door for beauty to be considered alongside building science, paving the way for qualitative measuring to inform high-performance building design and development.
“When we set out, we were pretty sure that beauty plays a role in building performance and that perhaps when we experience feeling fully alive, we might be acknowledging something in our built environment that can be measured,” states ml Robles, lead researcher on the study, Beauty in Building: Measuring the Impact of Spaces That Make Us Feel Fully Alive and That Inspire, available at Beauty in Building White Paper, The study found this to be true and further more uncovered that integration may well be a fundamental characteristic of beauty in the built environment. Using the Beauty in Building (BiB) matrix that was developed in the study to qualitatively measure a building’s environmental impact, award-winning high-performing certified buildings were found to be 2.87 times more likely to have integrated building strategies than those that were within the high-performing certified group of buildings.
Although there has been substantial research to support the fact that design affects occupants, there have been no attempts to measure the impact of spaces that promote wellbeing on building performance. Do beautiful buildings perform differently? Data from the study shows evidence that, on average, award-winning high-performing certified buildings accumulate BiB points 4 to 1 over simply high-performing certified buildings.
“We expect our findings will encourage architects to speak out more confidently about the value of well-being in the built environment. Beauty has long been considered as an aesthetic proposition that has no chance of being qualified. Our study opens the door for, in the words of architect Luis Barragan, mention of inspiration and spellbound, and concepts of serenity and amazement to have a place in this critical time of rethinking how we engage the built environment. Architecture is fundamentally a creative undertaking; we shouldn’t continue to ignore the role beauty plays in building performance,” suggests Robles.
http://www.patternmapping.com/PDF/BeautyinBuilding_white%20paper-29-02.pdf
PatternMapping institute: timely information and the means to utilize it with intelligence. PatternMapping institute is based in Boulder, Colorado and was founded in 2007 with a focus on built environment research. They published Better Buildings Guide in 2010, the first user-friendly guide to green building standards.
