Today, many people spend more than 90 per cent of their lives in buildings. Studies indicate that the aesthetic qualities of architecture have an impact on our mood, cognitive functioning, behavior and even health. The salutogenic design seeks to address these needs with a transdisciplinary approach, where architecture, psychology and medicine are intertwined.
In recent years thanks to neuroimaging tools such as electroencephalography, functional magnetic resonance imaging and near infrared spectroscopy , and thanks to an extensive scientific research, it has been possible to document the impact of beauty experience on brain areas.
In general, whenever one has an aesthetic experience involving any stimulus that gives a sense of pleasantness, the stress hormone cortisol 'drops' as does anxiety. The beauty of natural environments and of buildings designed in a proper way paying attention to contours, colors, harmony of forms act on a specialized brain center located in orbito-frontal cortex, which evolved with the human species and probably did not exist at the time of Homo Heidelbergensis, a hominid who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, before Neanderthal man and Homo sapiens. This center has been called the center of beauty by Samir Zeki, as it integrates sensations of various kinds that our species judges to be beautiful, be they visual, olfactory, gustatory and even auditory.
The stimulation of this center, which is located in the orbitofrontal cortex, reverberates in other centers of the brain, and in particular in the basal nuclei, ancestral centers (therefore ancient at an evolutionary level) that, when activated, bring into play neuromediators, i.e. chemical substances to which we owe the various sensations of peace, contentment, and pleasantness that we experience when we appreciate beauty. Recently, studies have been conducted on the cerebral response to architecture by investigating the effect of spaces with different geometries. It has been seen, for example, that curvilinear spaces are able to activate brain centers of the beauty circuit, with reverberations on the basal nuclei and increase of salutogenic neuromediators. In the brain first, and then throughout the body, molecules such as dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins are in fact put into circulation, each of which can interfere in various ways with anxiety, stress, depression. These are precisely the mediators to which the salutogenic effects of architectural beauty are attributed.