The Built Environment

The built environment forms the setting where people conduct their lives. A more positively stimulating environment leads to a higher quality of life for the inhabitants of that environment. Architects ability to stimulate the senses with the aim of enhancing the quality of life becomes more important once the focus is on communities with low- incomes as their access to quality architecture is limited by virtue of their financial constraints. This research seeks to improve the quality of lives of high density communities by designing anchor institutions with stimulative architecture that engages the senses with the built fabric. Improving the quality of life of individuals is an essential purpose of society. A gauge for the quality of life includes not only employment, affluence, physical health, mental health, and education but also the built environment, recreation and leisure time, and social belonging. As such it becomes imperative that architecture directly focuses its efforts on ensuring that the built environment leads in the advancement of the quality of life of individuals. Elements to consider include social connections among users and the physical conditions that impact the individual‘s experience.

It is possible to stimulate the brainwave of and an individual through direct interactions such as sound. The effectiveness of such stimuli may improve cognitive functioning, mood, and behaviour have been uses in medical field. Architects are able to manipulate a space by determining volume, form, textures, and colours and there by directly control the environment in which an individual is. In so doing the nature of a space can be tailored so as to illicit a specific response from the user and in so doing impact the brainwave which will create a brain state of the user in a desired

Indeed, available data does not make it possible to distinguish, for example, whether the lack of contact is imposed or chosen. In the built environment the means with which architecture encourages social connection through designing environments that promote contact with others will be interrogated. It should follow that the perception of a public place as welcoming and inviting have a direct ability to affect the quality of the user experience, and assist in promoting a vibrant public realm. An individual experiences the built environment through his senses and as such those senses form the primary portal with which space is experienced. How the architect manipulates a space with different architectural elements would thus have a consequential impact on the senses. The architectural fabric comprises a diverse set of elements that can be cohesively manipulated to form a unique composition and dynamic space. Scale and dimension, solid and void, complexity and simplicity, form and function, colour, texture, acoustics, these all form an assortment of elements that make up an architectural fabric. Careful and homogenous management of these can have an experience in the architectural fabric and form is achieved in the total composition of one or more senses, and as a result there absence of one sense, can and does affect the desired effect of the observer. The simplicity or