In one photograph from Concrete Human, three people stand behind a window in a dark room. Two adults, a child with curly hair, curtains drawn, all three looking outward. The scene may be staged; either way the room around them reads as a space that does the people inside it no good.
The exhibition works from a single claim about how that happens. A person’s nervous system judges a room, its light, its air, its material, its sound, in milliseconds, long before conscious sight has registered anything. The outcome is a bodily state, settled before the mind can weigh in, calm or on alert.
The research behind that claim is not new. Office workers with a window sleep 46 minutes longer than those without one (Boubekri et al., 2014, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine). In Chicago public housing, buildings with more greenery nearby recorded 52 percent fewer crimes overall than buildings with little (Kuo and Sullivan, 2001, Environment and Behavior). More than 100,000 people in the WHO European Region died in 2012 from indoor air pollution (WHO Europe, 2012 data). Decades of findings sit in journals most architects never open, and little of that research reaches an actual building site.
That gap is not a cost problem. I have written elsewhere about what buildings that respect the people inside them actually cost, and the number is rarely the obstacle. The gap sits somewhere between access and awareness. The data exists. Reading a study and understanding it is possible. Turning that understanding into a built decision, without a further jolt, rarely happens. A report states a fact. It does not make an architect feel the weight of a bad room, and a feeling is what changes a decision.
I came to this by a private route. A real estate project of my own put me in the same room as a very capable, and above all empathic, architect. Conversations with him turned into an idea, and the idea kept travelling after the conversations ended. It reached an architecture conference in Oslo, where I met the Norwegian photographer André Clemetsen. André, a sought-after portrait photographer, took to the idea at once: photograph people inside badly designed urban spaces, and make visible what happens to them in and around those buildings. At the start there was no science in it, only observation. The project grew out of that.
It became 36 photographs and 22 poems, published as a living online exhibition. The technical question interested me almost as much as the content: how do you show large-format photography, the kind meant to hang on a wall to work, on a screen and still have it work? The solution works, and it looks nothing like a conventional photo gallery online. The exhibition runs as 22 rooms in fullscreen cinema mode. It opens with a breathing overlay that asks the viewer to sit down, slow their breath and let the images arrive. There is no scrolling, no clicking through thumbnails and no museum interface. The images come to the viewer rather than the other way round. I had never built anything like it, and doing it was a pleasure.
Photography of people inside the built environment is never neutral, and André works with that fact rather than against it. He sets a mood and stages it. Dorothea Lange did the same with poverty in the 1930s, and I am a big fan of hers. Working without digital cameras and without post-production, she showed what was actually there and what others walked past, which is why her photographs still hit hard decades later.
My own interest in the topic did not start with research. I have built houses and furnished offices, and got nearly everything wrong that can be got wrong. Call it an experiment: what happens when excess consumer enthusiasm meets amateur interior design, when you buy expensive furniture, assemble it badly and feel proud of it anyway. I failed at it, and the missing atmosphere sent me the bill. I noticed something simple in the process: you walk into one room and want to stay, into another and have one thought, get out. Understanding that took time, and it came from living inside rooms I had spent real money furnishing badly.
Alongside that I have studied consciousness for decades, Satprem’s Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness among the texts I keep returning to. A stable inner state makes the outer world matter less, though it is not untouchable. A room can support that state or wear it down, and most of the time a person does not notice which is happening. It takes a while for the conscious mind to find words for what a room has already decided.
As an advisor I mostly work on the conceptual and strategic side of projects. As AI tools matured, I learned to evaluate scientific research data through data analysis and algorithmic assessment, and that shifted what I do. Much of my work now connects the hard facts a study produces with what a person in a building is meant to feel, whether that is pressed down, moved, excited or motivated. The task is to find the right data for a given question and draw the right conclusions from it, then take those conclusions to someone who can act on them.
The project introduced me to people asking the same question from different directions. Daiana Zamler is an architect and PhD researcher studying the effect of built spaces. Ola Elvestuen is Norway’s former minister of climate and the environment. Different backgrounds, the same unease: people in this field know what a room does to a person, and developers keep building as though they did not know.
We spend 90 percent of our lives inside buildings. Square metres and yield drive the decisions of the firms that build them, and their spreadsheets reduce the person who has to live inside the result to a usage assumption. Concrete Human is meant to state that fact through confrontation rather than argument. My hope for it is modest and specific: that someone stands in front of one of these images, feels the pressure the room in it puts on the person inside and starts looking at their own four walls differently.