In the summer of 2025 I visited a photography exhibition in Munich. The theme was civilisation, how we live today, and the images were beautifully curated. I left with a handful of pictures in my head and no memory of why the curator had chosen them. On the way home I worked out the reason: the curator had arranged them as art, and no question tied them together. Without one, nothing stayed with me beyond the pictures themselves.
That absence pointed to a problem I know from a different angle. I co-founded Concrete Human (concretehuman.com), a photography exhibition built as a curation of neuroscience, architecture and photography, and it exists to solve exactly what I felt walking out of that gallery.
What the data cannot do
Research on how buildings affect the people inside them is not scarce. Ceiling height changes how people think. Daylight in an office determines how well someone sleeps that night. Noise raises cortisol, and greenery reduces crime. Allen and colleagues found that under the best test conditions better indoor air raised cognitive performance by up to 101 percent (Allen et al., 2016, Environmental Health Perspectives). None of this is speculative. It is in peer-reviewed journals that academics read.
Mayors, investors, architects and planners know the general shape of these findings. They rarely work with the quantified versions of them. I have sat in council meetings myself, and I did not think about the research in the moment either. The knowledge stays outside the room where they decide.
The limits of a chart
Infographics and slide decks could translate these findings, and sometimes one creates a moment of surprise inside a presentation. By the next morning it is gone, folded back into the ordinary flow of information a person absorbs in a day. A chart can inform. Acting on what a building does to the people inside it takes more than a point taken on board intellectually. Someone has to feel what a bad room does to a human being before they change anything, and no line or bar, however well designed, produces that feeling.
Why photography works
A photograph of a man staring at his phone in a windowless concrete corridor leaves a stronger impression than the study proving that a lack of visual connection to nature raises blood pressure. The photograph works for a different reason than precision. Once it is seen, a feeling forms, and that feeling stays after the viewer has left the room.
That effect depends on curation. A photograph left to stand alone loses the connection back to the finding it illustrates, and without the research behind it, an image risks becoming decoration, however striking. Once a caption, a study and a context frame the photograph, the data becomes something a person can feel and still trace back to its source.
When someone identifies a room that measurably makes people ill, and sees the actual person suffering inside it, the urgency becomes legible in a way no paper achieves on its own. For people who will never read a database or an architectural plan, and who are affected by both anyway, a photograph opens access that would not otherwise exist. Residents, citizens, patients, children and the officials and planners responsible for these buildings can all read an image.
The numbers behind it
The cost of the indoor-air improvement Allen and colleagues measured comes to under 40 dollars per person per year. The estimated productivity gain from that same improvement comes to 6,500 dollars per person per year (MacNaughton et al., 2015, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health). The industry’s own rule of thumb, often cited as “3-30-300” (JLL), puts payroll at roughly 90 percent of a company’s per-square-foot office costs, with only about 10 percent in rent and energy. Workplaces without daylight cost roughly three quarters of an hour of sleep per employee, per night (Boubekri et al., 2014, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine). The WHO calculated in 2015 that air pollution, indoor and outdoor together, costs the WHO European Region about 1.6 trillion US dollars a year in deaths and disease (WHO Europe, 2015). The British Building Research Establishment puts the cost of poor-quality housing in England to the NHS at about 1.4 billion pounds a year (BRE, 2021).
The real distinction
Ecological building costs money. Better materials, insulation systems, solar technology and heat recovery add a few percent to a project, and more at the highest certification levels such as LEED Platinum (Kats, 2010, Greening Our Built World). That is the price of technology.
Human-centred building, the kind that puts the person at the centre and raises their productivity, costs almost nothing extra. I don’t like this sentence either, but the numbers back it. What it demands is time: someone has to sit with the data long enough to apply it. Ceiling heights, window placement, acoustic zoning and materials are design decisions, a matter of composition, proportion, light, air and location. The decision that matters comes earlier than any of that, well before hiring an architect: who is this building for? That question stands above both design and cost. It is a gap in knowledge, and closing it means making that knowledge visible to everyone with a stake in the outcome.
The exhibition as analysis
A city can be photographed as analysis, so that it becomes visible from a new angle. Every photograph follows a dataset. The system behind it is ontological: it structures the knowledge in thousands of studies and supplies, for each documented situation, the scientific explanation for why a square feels oppressive, why a street raises stress and why the park between them still fails to calm anyone down. Visitors come away understanding their own city better, and politicians get a sharper tool for deciding. Planners get a clearer sense of what their responsibility actually covers. All of it becomes public. The first message to any visitor is simple: why the place feels the way it does, and what it would take to make it better.
Thousands of research findings already explain, with precision, why rooms heal people or make them ill. Between those findings lies an enormous grey zone that almost no one outside the field ever reads about, let alone understands. Concrete Human sets a photograph next to the finding behind it, kept together by curation so the two do not drift apart, and gives a mayor, an investor or a resident a reason to act on knowledge that has gone unused for years.