3rd Edition
Places of the Soul Architecture and environmental design as a healing art
For Christopher Day, architecture isn’t just about the appearance of buildings but how they’re experienced as places to be in. Occupants’ experience can differ radically from designers’ intentions as their concerns and thinking differ. Additionally, multi-sensory ambience, spatial sequential experience and embodied spirit resonate in the human soul. Sustainable design means much more than energy-efficiency: if sustainable buildings don’t also nourish the soul, occupant-building interaction will lack care and eco-technologies won’t be used efficiently. This major revision of his classic text builds on more than forty years of experience ecological design across a range of climates, cultures and budgets, and 25 years hands-on building.
Treating buildings as environments intrinsic to their surroundings, the book explores consensus design, economic and social sustainability, and how a listening approach can grow architectural ideas organically from the interacting, sometimes conflicting, requirements of place, people and situation.
This third edition, comprehensively revised to incorporate new knowledge and address new issues, continues Day’s departure from orthodox contemporary architecture, offering eye-opening insights and practical design applications. These principles and guidelines will be of interest and value to architects, builders, planners, developers and homeowners alike.
Reviews of the first edition
... one of the seminal architecture books of recent times
Professor Tom Wooley, Architects Journal
The 'bible' of many architects and those interested in architecture.
Centre for Alternative Technology
... an inspiration to all those who care about the influence of the environment on Man’s health and well-being.
Barrie May, The Scientific and Medical Network
At last an architect has written a sensitive and caring book on the effects of buildings on all our lives.
Here’s Health
This gentle book offers a route out of the nightmare of so much callous modern construction. I was inspired.
Colin Amery, The Financial Times
Foreword by HRH Prince Charles Preface 2002: New Millenium: New Issues Preface 2012: Soul in our eco-crisis age 1. Architecture: Does It Matter? 2. How environment affects us 3. Place: placemaking and place-generation 4. Space for Living In: shape, form, space and life 5. Lines: material realities or bearers of energy? 6. Qualities and Quantities 7. The senses: gateways to the world 8. Light: nourishment for body and soul 9. Spirit of place, of project, of buildings 10. Ensouling Buildings 11. Conversation or Conflict? 12. Architecture as Art 13. Architecture With Health-Giving Intent 14. Healing Silence: the Architecture of Peace 15. Soul or survival? 16. Building for Planetary Health 17. Building for Human Health 18. Design as a Listening Process: Co-creating Places 19. Building as a Health-Giving Process 20. Children and Environment 21. Accessibility for All: Compromise for Soul? 22. Urban life, Urban needs 23. Development: continuity-destruction or place-improvement? 24. Urban problems: urban opportunities 25. Eco-cities: achievable or utopian dream? 26. Building for Tomorrow Appendix 1. Lazure: inexpensive technique Appendix 2. Target pricing examples Appendix 3. Hand-finished Plastering List of photographs Bibliography Index
Biography
Christopher Day is an eco-architect, self-builder and sculptor. He designs buildings in line with the ecological principles of his books and has won several awards, including a Prince of Wales award. A former visiting professor at Queen’s University, Belfast, he has also designed, consulted, taught and lectured in over twenty countries across the world, from California to Siberia, Sweden to New Zealand.
