A physical response to architecture

Two Swiss architects design rooms to change your hormone levels.

Architecture is about space and light, usually considered in the abstract. But Swiss architects Philippe Rahm and Jean-Gilles Décosterd are fascinated with how the these properties affect us physically. In a series of projects over the past four years, they have examined the relationship between the external environment and human physiology, for example by modifying the composition of the air, or the wavelength of the light, that fills their architectonic space. They are aware that this is bringing architecture to an ethical crossroads.

This year they were selected to represent Switzerland at the Eighth International Architecture Exhibition at the La Biennale de Venezia, which closed recently, for which they designed their 'Hormonorium'. Fittingly, the Hormonorium transports a high-Alpine environment to sea level, in much the same way that an urban swimming pool might be considered to be bringing the environment of a lake into a city.

Mountain high: the Hormonorium's Alpine oxygen level boosts erythropoetin production. Credit: JEAN-MICHEL LANDECY

The Hormonorium is a plain white room containing four white sofas. The visitor enters through a system of air-tight double doors. The floor of the room is imbedded with long rows of bright, full-spectrum fluorescent lights. Lit from below, the extreme brightness of the room evokes the snow-reflected light on a mountain-top on a sunny day. The ultraviolet part of the spectrum tans the skin, the infrared part could burn it. The level of oxygen in the air is reduced from the normal 21% at sea level to just 14.5%, as it would 3,000 metres up a mountain. After 10 minutes, the visitor experiences the pleasant light-headedness that accompanies a successful climb.

Playing further with the invisible parameters of the environment, the architects fill the room with 'music' of such low frequency (40–80 Hz) that it is felt through vibration, rather than heard. Visitors must wear blue plastic overshoes that crunch on the glass floor, adding to the sensation of being surrounded by snow.

The Hormonorium is so-called because the low-oxygen environment raises levels of erythropoetin, a hormone that stimulates the production of red blood cells, at least after a few hours. This is the basis of high-altitude training, where athletes train in the mountains to pump up the concentration of their red blood cells, so they can use oxygen more efficiently during a race.

This is not the architects' first engagement with hormone manipulation. Their 'Melatonin Room', exhibited last year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, was alternately filled with an intense green light and a weak ultraviolet light, which suppress the production of the sleep hormone melatonin to different degrees. But if all this sounds like installation art rather than architecture, Rahm would disagree. He considers himself an architect first and foremost: “I want to work in the real world,” he says.

Together with Décosterd, Rahm is designing a 'winter house', commissioned by a French artist and to be built near France's Atlantic coast. The house recreates a tropical environment in a very literal way. The lighting will mimic, in intensity and timing, the natural day-and-night cycle of French Polynesia. The air will be as warm and moist as in Tahiti — and also just as scented, because the room that heats the house's circulating air will be packed with Tahitian plants. With its sealed and dislocated environment, the house will be used for just a few winter days at a time.

Rahm and Décosterd are moving ahead faster on the philosophical, rather than the practical, front with their physiological architecture. “There are ethical barriers to the wide use of architecture to modulate mood,” says Rahm.