Workplace Design for Health:
Part One

Buildings are alive and affect productivity

Author Paul Whelan

The spaces we inhabit and work in shape our lives in so many ways. Winston Churchill famously stated that “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Our buildings are not just passive containers for human activity – they are active participants in our lives.

There are many examples of this in our own history. Churchill wrote in his memoirs about the reconstruction of the British Houses of Parliament after the bomb damage of the Second World War.

For Churchill, there were two critical elements to the House of Commons: The first was that the room should be rectangular with seats facing each other across an open space. He felt that a semi-circular room allowed MPs to shift and shade around the political spectrum. In the English tradition, an MP may need to make a stand and cross the floor to join the opposition or the government. This political reality is created and dictated by the architecture of the space.

His second critical point was that there should not be enough seats for all the members. This opinion was based on a strong commitment to the conversational style of parliamentary democracy. A room with enough seats for all would be too large for intimate debate. But perhaps more importantly, Churchill understood the relationship between space and political performance. When only a few of the members were present, a large room would feel depressingly empty, but during important debates when there was standing-room only, the space became politically charged with a heightened sense of importance.

Buildings have also shaped Christian religious culture. Christians began to use Roman basilicas for worship, which were originally built as large halls for facilitating business transactions. They had a long day-lit space down the middle of the building with lower spaces on each side behind a row of columns. At the end of the basilica there was a shallow niche where a senior official sat and adjudicated business disputes.

The adaptation of the basilica form would resonate through the next 1,700 hundred years of Christianity. The nature of the space and the power position assumed by the priesthood consolidated the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church and subsequent protestant churches. The regular spacing of the columns together with the upper stained glass bible stories emphasized life as pilgrimage towards God starting from the church entry. Many Christian rituals have developed in response to the original architecture of the roman basilica form.

1.)	Church – The powerful spatial rhythm impels movement towards the altar and asserts the primacy of the altar in the space. Photo Credit: Jennifer McGibbon
2.)	Ontario House of Parliament – The rows of opposition and government facing off across the ‘floor’. Photo Credit: with permission of the government of Ontario

Uniformity of Office Space: Monocultures

In light of these examples, what will future anthropologists make of our workplaces and our work culture? Perhaps the most telling feature will be the uniformity of office space – a form of spatial monoculture. The term monoculture has been applied to agriculture and has recently found its way into computer software and sociology literature. Monoculture is traditionally used to describe an agriculture where larger areas are devoted to the same crop year after year.