The Role of Place and Space in Wellness
WILLOW VILLAGE, MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA
The Role of Place and Space in Wellness
WILLOW VILLAGE, MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA
“The reason behind this intensified interest is clear: there’s a pressing need for change in how people are currently approaching their health and overall wellness.”
PALMETTO BLUFF, BLUFFTON, SOUTH CAROLINA
While the urban designers of the past played a critical role in helping rapidly growing cities overcome severe epidemics of infectious diseases—from tuberculosis and cholera to typhoid and yellow fever—communities across the country face a different but equally compelling health threat today. This threat comes from the spread of chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease, Type-2 diabetes, asthma as well as poor mental health.
A related concern that’s particularly worrisome is the rise—both nationally and globally—in obesity levels. While obesity rates have shot up dramatically, there has been a corresponding plummet in physical activity levels for adults and children alike, with less than half of American adults meeting the Surgeon General’s guidelines for physical activity. With a known link connecting obesity and physical inactivity with chronic diseases, solving this collective health problem becomes an urgent need.
Hart Howerton has stepped up to do our part in designing and implementing projects that result in healthy places and spaces—residences, neighborhoods, and other venues that ultimately help upgrade the well-being of their residents and thus transform communities. We’ve taken bold steps toward transcending this national and global health crisis, emerging as a thought leader in answering the “how to’s” about the best ways to effectively build structures and communities that can support health in all of its dimensions—not only physical health, but also emotional well-being and mental health.
The fact is, making appropriate changes to the built environment—changes that can facilitate the type of lifestyle shifts that can make a real difference in health and wellness—is a smart solution to address the nation’s current health challenges. Emerging research suggests that these types of design decisions, interventions, and strategies are a needed, and potentially transformative, approach to improving health and wellness person by person, and community-wide.
ISLAS SECAS RESERVE & LODGE, CHIRIQUI, PANAMA
DNA-Level Wellness Design
SILO RIDGE FIELD CLUB, AMENIA, NEW YORK
As this dynamic continues to unfold, Hart Howerton plays a unique role in the growing global movement that’s collectively prioritizing innovative approaches to wellness design. It’s not just a fad to us—it’s in our very DNA as a continued essential component of how we approach thinking about every project and place. We’re not just talking about health and wellness components as amenities, but as part of the core of our intrinsic design philosophy, vision, and implementation. Designing for wellness permeates the heart of the firm and offers an added value that’s inherent in the way we work. It’s a perk for, and a promise to, our clients.
You can see ripples of this vision throughout our 50-year history. When Robert Lamb Hart founded Hart Howerton back in the 1960s, he centered the firm’s ideology around the ways that people spend time in places and who they spend time with, emphasizing the importance of understanding why people choose to be in one space versus another.
NEXTON, CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA
HOLLYWOOD PARK, INGLEWOOD, CALIFORNIA
To this day, these types of aspirations inform the qualities of the spaces where we design our complete environments, and the types of places we house within these spaces, uniting our entire portfolio through a lens of wellness. Each community’s unique needs inform our designs, which we create while keeping the human experience top of mind so that residents can thrive. This mindset and vision permeate each Hart Howerton project, from the moment we pick a site, through providing access to recreation opportunities and easy access to healthy food, to figuring out how to incorporate location traditions.
A whole systems approach—one that looks at the entire landscape, not just a single building—is inherent in the way we work, and the way we create and design living solutions. And this approach hasn’t gone unnoticed. Based on our wellness design research, our firm was tapped to serve as a peer reviewer for the WELL Community Standard, and in so doing influenced the development of the current codes that are used to metric performance.