Watch The Secret Life of Buildings on Channel 4, 8th August at 8pm
and on 4OD shortly afterwards.
Myself, Jack Bowman and James Tweedy (and a film crew, a neuroscientist and a presenter) recently invaded a working office to see just how disruptive working in an open plan office can actually be. The kind folk at Elsevier let us purposefully be rowdy for one morning in their offices in Camden but even though the Elsevier staff dutifully carried on working our focus was on presenter Tom Dyckhoff. He was hooked up to an ECG monitoring his brain waves as we put tried our best to be annoying and stressful whilst he was trying to work.
Dyckhoff interrogates the world’s pre-eminent architects and their creations with new eyes. He challenges their assumptions by bringing them face to face with the people who actually use their buildings and argues that architecture should be less about ego, art and economics and more about environmental psychology and individual well-being.
