Active Living Architecture 4m5a2o

DISSERTATION ON:

ACTIVE LIVING ARCHITECTURE COMPILED BY: RITIKA BHATIA

WHAT IS ACTIVE LIVING DESIGN? • Active Living Design is the theory that: “ the design of the built environment has a direct impact on public health, and specifically today’s public health epidemics of obesity and related chronic diseases.” • Active

living refers to opportunities for incorporating physical activity into the routines of daily life, as well as for sport and recreation.

EXAMPLES OF ACTIVE LIVING INCLUDE : • walking or cycling with children to school; • walking, cycling or catching public transport to work; • or replacing short car trips to corner shops and parks by walking or cycling.

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KEY RECOMMENDATIONS IN THE ACTIVE DESIGN PERSPECTIVE:

Research has suggested that greater land use mix is correlated with lower obesity. Evidence suggests that the more schools, grocery stores, newsstands, and other useful destinations in an area, the more likely residents are to walk. Facilitate for cyclists : “Facilitate bicycling for transportation and recreation by incorporating infrastructure like safe indoor and outdoor bicycle parking.” Access to fresh food : “Studies have demonstrated that the presence of full-service grocery stores in a neighbourhood is associated with healthier diets and lower weight among residents. Conversely, high concentration of fast food with increased weight and risk of obesity among area residents.” It is recommended farmers’ markets will compliment grocery stores. Pedestrian pathways : “Provide seating, drinking fountains, restrooms and other infrastructure that increased frequency

BUILDING EXTERIORS: “Design building exteriors and massing that contribute to a pedestrian friendly urban environment that include variety and transparency, multiple entries, stoops, and canopies” BUILDING PROGRAMMING: • In residential environments, place functions such as community and recreational spaces, mailrooms, and management offices on an alternative floor or a pleasant walking distance from individual residences and building entrances, in order to encourage daily bouts of walking and stair climbing • Design spaces and activities to encourage more personal communication between people within the building, and less sedentary, electronic communication. Provide spaces where people can stay together and engage in productive, pleasant and safe social interaction. APPEALING AND IVE INTERNAL WALKING ROUTES: “Incorporate interesting views along paths of travel within a building. These views may include:  natural and designed landscapes,  nearby architecture,  interior views of people-oriented activities, and  visually appealing interior finishes. Provide day lighting along paths of travel.”

BUILDING FACILITIES THAT EXERCISE: • Provide physical activity spaces such as exercise rooms, active play spaces, and multi-purpose recreational spaces in public, workplace, and residential buildings. • Provide these spaces with interesting views. Research indicates exercise is more appealing with views to nature and human activities. • Locate physical activity spaces in centrally visible locations in the building, to help increase awareness and use of these spaces.

STAIRS : • Increase stair use among the able-bodied by providing a conveniently located stair for everyday use, posting motivational signage to encourage stair use, and deg visible, appealing and comfortable stairs.

AIMS OF ACTIVE DESIGN • Active Design calls on the architect, urban planner, landscape architect, public official, and building owner to help focus on four primary ways by which healthier habits may be introduced and fostered: • Alternate transportation • active buildings • active recreation • access to healthy nutrition.

ACTIVE LIVING DESIGN AIMS AT PROVIDING: • Alternate transportation emphasizes increased access to safe and usable cycling and walking routes. This involves creating complete streets- streets which are usable in a safe manner for cyclists and pedestrians. This strategy requires carefully deg bike lanes and sidewalks for maximum safety and effectiveness. • Active buildings encourage the use of stairs over elevators/escalators. They also feature outside walking paths, bike storage, and wellness education. Finally, active buildings are located within the urban fabric allowing for access via alternate transportation. • Active recreation can be realized in many different ways from increasing access to existing parks to deg outdoor plazas and playgrounds which are vibrant and engaging. • Access to healthy nutrition comes from introducing community gardens and farmers markets in cities as well as numerous other strategies aimed at eliminating food deserts.

Building Design: Creating Opportunities for Daily Physical Activity

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Opportunities for incorporating regular physical activity into daily life can be found not only outdoors but inside buildings as well. Architects can help building occupants incorporate physical activity into their daily routines through the following measures: Increase stair use among the able-bodied by providing a conveniently located stair for everyday use, posting motivational signage to encourage stair use, and deg visible, appealing and comfortable stairs; Locate building functions to encourage brief bouts of walking to shared spaces such as mail and lunch rooms, provide appealing, ive walking routes within buildings; Provide facilities that exercise such as centrally visible physical activity spaces, showers, locker rooms, secure bicycle storage, and drinking fountains; Design building exteriors and massing that contribute to a pedestrian friendly urban environment and that include maximum variety and transparency, multiple entries, stoops, and canopies.

OBJECTIVES • Develop and maintain mixed land use in city neighbourhoods; • Improve access to transit and transit facilities; • Improve access to plazas, parks, open spaces, and recreational facilities, and design these spaces to maximize their active use where appropriate; • Improve access to full-service grocery stores and fresh produce; • Design accessible, pedestrian-friendly streets with high connectivity, traffic calming features, landscaping, lighting, benches, and water fountains; • Facilitate bicycling for recreation and transportation by developing continuous bicycle networks and incorporating infrastructure like safe indoor and outdoor bicycle parking.

scope 1. A PUSH TOWARDS A GREENER ENVIRONMENT: Such projects not only develop greener surroundings but also compliment the growing urge to work in sync with nature. 2. REDUCTION IN DEPENDENCE ON NON-RENEWABLE SOURCES OF ENERGY: It is very important in today’s world to decrease the amount of electricity and other ingeniously generated source of energy and encourage eco-friendly and non-depleting energy sources that can serve us better and for a longer period of time. 3. ADDING AESTHETICS TO THE ENVIRONMENT: Blending art and architecture has been a natural remedy to overcome many obstructions while deg a space, therefore active living architecture counts upon the idea of developing attractive and aesthetically brilliant spaces under it. For example neat and lavishly deigned walkways and circulation areas become more conventional for the people to use. 4.

USING ARCHITECTURE AS A TOOL TO MEDICATE: Active living architecture tries to make full use of itself to medicate people so that architecture is beheld from a totally new perspective; it is therefore a step towards innovation in this renowned field of art.

5. IMPORTANCE OF BUILT ENVIRONMENT INCREASES: Architects nowadays need to concentrate on the built environment as much as the space to be built.

Limitations 1. NOT SUITABLE TO EVERY SPACE: Such strategies tend to fail in places where handicapped, elderly or differently-abled people live their daily lives because they cannot cope up with such physically challenging aspects of architecture. 2. HIGH PRICES IN MARKET: Maintenance and construction costs of such conceptual places is quite high, making it unaffordable for most of the classes of society. 3. REQUIREMENT OF MORE SPACE AND RESOURCES: Due to nonavailability of space for horizontal growth, actively designed projects are hard to execute. 4. DISTURBS THE IDEA OF COMFORT TO SOME EXTENT: There is some sort of difficulty in convincing people to leave their comfort zones in today’s world, thus everyone readily does not accept such concepts of design.

METHODS TO EXECUTE….

ACTIVE DESIGN- BUILDING SCALE: INTERIORS Design at the individual building scale plays an important role in Active Design. Ramps and monumental stairs help to encourage increased physical activity in commercial offices and in many other public spaces such as theatres, museums, and retail. Medical professionals and public health experts have widely discussed and published evidence showing small incremental increases in physical activity daily can improve overall wellness.

MONUMENTAL STAIRS 1. Communicate between two frequently occupied floors 2. Be visible from the main entrance (or centre of activity) 3. Be visually appealing 4. Have a gentle rise/run slope 5. Be located stair close to (but slightly more visible than) elevators 6. If fire rated enclosure cannot be avoided (due to code), consider implementing fire rated glass enclosures to increase transparency, visibility and aesthetics 7. Be wide enough to easily accommodate expected flow 8. Be located in a naturally day lit area if possible

RAMPS 1. Communicate between two frequently occupied floors 2. Consider locating the primary lobby on the second floor nearest to the monumental stair or ramp 3. When deg in double height spaces, consider deg work areas on an elevated platform accessible via ramp and elevator. (This may help to capture additional storage space underneath, and enables the work areas to use under floor air distribution systems). ELEVATORS 1. Locate out of direct line of sight from building entrance 2. Program controls to run just slightly slower than average (hint, this helps to save energy also!) BUILDING DESIGN 1. Include shower and changing areas for staff who cycle to work 2. Include a park like walking path outside to enable staff to exercise before or after work (or take a break midday) 3. Provide educational displays on how the building contributes towards wellness 4. Locate amenities such as break rooms, copy rooms, mailrooms, shared equipment spaces, and meeting rooms a pleasant walking distance from work areas.

ACTIVE DESIGN-NEIGHBOURHOOD SCALE: EXTERIOR LAND USE MIX 1. Collocate places where people live and work with the places where they learn and play. Develop areas which locate office and commercial areas with relative adjacency to schools, parks and housing. STREET CONNECTIVITY 1. Avoid deg street networks with block lengths longer than 200 -250 feet. 2.Minimize the use of “closed streets” which prohibit traffic flow. 3. Focus on Safety First in deg places where pedestrians and vehicles may cross perpendicular to one another. 4. Include local emergency personnel in PreDesign vision sessions when laying out street structures in new developments to ensure emergency vehicles can safely travel.

PARKS AND RECREATIONAL SPACES 1. Ensure bikes + pedestrians have easy access to parks 2. Design parks according to local cultural preferences and allow for use by all age groups.

PLAZAS 1. Design plazas as open space within the urban fabric along pedestrian routes. 2.Provide sun shading devices in hot climates, and provide overhead coverage in rainy climates. 3. Incorporate public art and/or areas for street vendors.

PHYSICAL FEATURES OF THE STREET ENVIRONMENT These characteristics were defined qualitatively as: • Imageability is the quality of a place that makes it distinct, recognizable,

and memorable. A place has high imageability when specific physical elements and their arrangement capture attention, evoke feelings, and create a lasting impression.

• Enclosure refers to the degree to which streets and other public spaces are visually defined by buildings, walls, trees, and other vertical elements.

• Human scale refers to a size, texture, and articulation of physical elements that match the size and proportions of humans and, equally important, correspond to the speed at which humans walk.

• Transparency refers to the degree to which people can see or perceive objects and activity—especially human activity—beyond the edge of a street.

• Complexity refers to the visual richness of a place. The complexity of a place depends on the variety of the physical environment.

THE THREE 3D’S

Researchers have identified THREE “D” variables that are key to analyzing the relationship between urban design and travel patterns: Density, diversity, and design—the original “three Ds” coined by Robert Cervero and Kara Kockelman— have since been supplemented by destination accessibility and distance to transit.

1. Density describes the concentration of jobs and people in a given urban zone, while diversity gauges the number, variety, and balance of land uses in the area. 2. Design includes the characteristics of a neighbourhood’s street network and streetscape. 3. Destination accessibility reflects the ease of travel to a central business district or other concentrated area of jobs and attractions. Distance to transit measures the average distance from home or work to the nearest rail station or bus stop.

THREE 3D’S

Conclusion Designers have an essential role in addressing the rapidly growing epidemics of obesity and related chronic diseases, especially in light of mounting scientific evidence demonstrating the impact of environmental design on physical activity and healthy eating. By adopting the strategies included in the Active Design Guidelines, architects and urban designers can help to significantly improve the health and well-being of the population.