Teguise, under a tree

“Right now, here, I have found my centre of peace. The shadows, the air, the wind, the tree… the people and the place. They make me be at peace…”

So begins this writing, a live narration of the moment when Laia, founder of Adjetivo Studio and researcher in neuroarchitecture, visited Teguise, a magical little village in Lanzarote. It is an example of what happens when we are faced with an architecture connected to the user and the environment.

When we speak of neuroarchitecture, we refer to a perspective of design that is concerned with its inhabitants, that looks at people and their holistic well-being.

So what happens when we experience architecture? Laia was lucky enough to be able to put it into words, marking a before and after in her way of seeing and experiencing architecture. For years she has dedicated her life to studying and researching architectural practice and its effect on people’s health, convinced that there is a relationship that goes beyond what the eyes can see.

Teguise is for her the proof that this relationship exists and that we must continue to delve into it in order to build an architecture that connects people, spaces and stories.

This is what she tells us:

“Right now, here, I have found my centre of peace. The shadows, the air, the wind, the tree… the people and the place. They make me at peace.

And myself. I feel that somehow, the process I have been immersed in these last few days, is paying off.

I walk slowly, little by little, without haste. I observe, let myself go and savour. I come into contact with everything around me in an extra-corporeal way.

I feel that everything is between me, here and now. In me, with me, within me, I am me; I AM AT PEACE. I observe the environment, how it enters into me and I into it, we are one.

I find it fascinating how and how much an environment can interfere with a person’s inner state, altering or pacifying it. How it can make us enter a state of absolute buoyancy, to the point of losing track of time, weight, life.

Right now everything around me is part of a secondary plane. There is only me and the present. I observe how the different elements that make up the current landscape participate in making it a unique environment; more than a place, an experience.

If I close my eyes and take a deep breath, I can even see myself from outside; in the middle of the square, sitting at a dark wooden table with only a chair, and me. A tea, and what’s left of the piece of cake; yummy. Me dressed in white, with light touches of blue. Tan skin, dark hair. Hand, mind and body connected and united into one, flowing at the same rhythm. No interference.

Shadows are projected on my notebook, product of the dance between nature and air. I notice the different elements present: EARTH, AIR, WATER and FIRE. Life passes around me from afar; nothing sustains, nothing retains. Timelessness; non-existence of the passage of time. Black and white; everything around me is frozen. The only moving image is me”.

TIC, TAC, THE DROP OF MY INK – I watch as it disappears and merges with the paper. My hands moving, wielding pen and sprouting on their own, as if they know exactly where they need to go.
I just watch them, they write.

This story is an exercise in abstraction that guides us to understand neuroarchitecture through words in order to see the direct relationship between emotions and architecture.

To do so, Laia outlines a brief analysis identifying those non-tangible elements of the space that made that place an experience beyond the physical.

When researching neuroarchitecture, one of the most complex tasks is to identify those invisible phenomena present in the environment that condition our experience by unleashing in us a series of physiological reactions linked to well-being, or not.

So, what is it that made Laia feel all that? What is the relationship between emotions and architecture?

Some of the elements are identified below:

• Air and ventilation.
• The scale and proportionality of the architecture.
• The distribution ⟶ openness of the space.
• The vegetation ⟶ a single tree in the whole square: CENTRE.
• The colour and chromatic range ⟶ White (which merges with the blue of the sky), arid, volcanic BLACK which merges with the brown of the furniture and vegetation.
• Architectural homogeneity ⟶ scale/proportion, typology, orientation, distribution, common spaces, unique and continuous paving, connectivity between areas.
• The unevenness and ground level ⟶ it is not flat, that generates different views and atmospheres (in the same place different atmospheres are generated).
• Passive architecture ⟶ gives prominence to life, people and the passing of time.
• The sobriety of the furniture ⟶ Simplicity, simplicity. The people stand out.