Salutogenic Design For The Workplace
Farrow Partners conceives salutogenic learning, healing, and working environments where innovative pedagogy is manifested in built form.
Lauremont School Elgin Mills Campus exterior view, Tom Arban
Educational facilities can be salutogenically designed to incite learning in a health-causing way by offering students a stimulating and engaging environment. Healthcare facilities offer services to patients that aid in the healing journey where health is aspired to through care, treatment, and spatial conditions. While students and patients may be the primary user group considered for the respective facilities, these environments are also places of work for educators and healthcare providers. Workplaces and working lives are increasingly recognized as critical arenas in which human health is constructed. Rather than viewing the work environment as a neutral backdrop, there is a growing call to understand working environments as systems that can actively generate health.
Lauremont School Elgin Mills campus dinging hall, Tom Arban
Maintaining a sense of coherence is the key to establishing health and wellness within the workplace. Comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness allow staff to interpret their workplace demands and environments while improving the capacity to respond to stressors.
The Lauremont Elgin Mills campus dining halls multi-stemmed timber columns and the middle schools similar swaying timber exoskeleton, create natural bodily affordances: they draw the eyes and chest upwards, inviting movement, lingering, and cross-room connection. These spatial invitations increase perceived environmental control, a key component of manageability, supporting a sense of coherence.
Terraced gardens at SZMC Helmsley Cancer Centre, Harel Gilboa
In healthcare facilities, staff are subjected to long hours in often secluded, dark, and clinical environments. At the SZMC Helmsley Cancer Centre, attention to staff experience within the building takes high priority. Generous circulation, daylight in work zones, and access to restorative views are factors that help staff retain a sense of coherence at The Butterfly, as it is affectionately named by staff. The terraced garden atrium brings natural sunlight to subterranean levels, allowing even radiology units to access nature. While the healing and treatment journey of patients remains the priority for oncology hospitals such as The Butterfly, staff health is crucial to maintaining staff wellbeing as they work to support vulnerable patients.