Venetian Letter

Keith (he/him) is an Associate and Senior Director of Experience Outcomes for the global design agency Forge Media and Design. He holds a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies from York University. He serves as a Fellow at McLaughlin College with peer-reviewed published works in Taylor and Francis Architectural Science Review. Keith is a member of the BrainXChange Design and Dementia Community of Practice, a board member of the Canadian Healthcare Infrastructure, a guest lecturer for the Ontario Association of Architects, the Neuroscience Applied to Architectural Design program in Venice, and other organizations. He’s also the founder of COUP, The Community of Unlikely Partnerships.

Natalia Olszewska: Keith, your journey through the world of design is special. You focus on the experiential aspects of design. What does that mean and how did you get there?

Keith Francis: I always thought there was a relationship between creativity and how it affected the human experience. It was often frustrating to work in a creative field where aesthetics, color palette, form, materiality, all of those things were leading the discussion. Especially when that happened at the expense of people who felt absent from the process.

The design palette was generally placed before the lived experience of people, whether they were neurotypical or neurodiverse or different cultures. I always felt that it should have been reversed.

Cleo Valentine is a doctoral candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on examining the impact of architectural form on neuroimmunology and neuroinflammation. Cleo received her MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies from the University of Cambridge, MSc in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford and Bachelor’s in Urban Systems and Economics from McGill University and the University of Copenhagen.

She has worked as a computational systems designer at Open Systems Lab (formerly Wikihouse), has held positions as the Neuroaesthetics Fellow at The Centre for Conscious Design and as a guest tutor at the Royal College of Art and the Architecture Association in London. She is currently an associate at Cambridge Architectural Research Ltd., where she provides consultancy services on public health and architecture.

Natalia Olszewska: I’m excited to talk to you because this is going to be a conversation where we can dive deep into human physiology and how it relates to architecture. What brought you to neuroarchitecture in the first place?

Cleo Valentine: My interest in neuroarchitecture comes from both my academic and personal experience. I first studied at McGill University in Montreal, where I did a program called Urban Systems.

It was at the intersection of urban studies and human geography, examining how people move through space and how urban environments evolve over time. It gave me an interdisciplinary approach to studying architecture and cities.

While at McGill, I had the opportunity to study at the University of Copenhagen on an exchange program. I became interested in going there after watching ‘The Human Scale’.

Working at the intersection of architecture and neuroscience, Tye Farrow is a world-recognized pioneer tackling how what we create gives or causes health. With award-winning projects around the globe that enact salutogenic design – design that actively incites health – he is the first Canadian architect to have earned a Master of Neuroscience Applied to Architecture (University of Venice IUAV), has a Master of Architecture in Urban Design (Harvard University), and a Bachelor of Architecture degree (University of Toronto).

Natalia Olszewska: You’re the first Canadian architect who studied neuroscience applied to architecture in Venice. What pushed you in this direction?

Tye Farrow: It started with our practice, Farrow Partners, which involves work with knowledge organizations, health organizations, and value-based companies with a clear purpose.

Early in my career, I began understanding the relationship between architecture and its effects on people and health on different levels. Health, for me, is like a table with four legs. And its four legs represent different ways design impacts life around it.

First is design’s impact on the natural environment. We designed some of the first and largest LEED projects in Canada, of their typology. Then we began to understand design’s impact on our physical body. You may know the New York City Active Design Guidelines describing how buildings can encourage you to move and be physically active.

Anjan Chatterjee is a Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and the founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics.

He received his BA in Philosophy from Haverford College, his MD from the University of Pennsylvania, and his neurology residency from the University of Chicago. Formerly Chair of Neurology at Pennsylvania Hospital, Dr. Chatterjee’s research interests include neuroaesthetics, spatial cognition, language, and neuroethics.

Anjan is the author of The Aesthetic Brain: How we evolved to desire beauty and enjoy art.

Natalia Olszewska: Anjan, could you tell our readers about your background?

Anjan Chatterjee: I’m a neurologist and a cognitive neuroscientist. For over thirty years, I’ve studied spatial attention, language, and the relationship between language and space. I’ve done work in neuroethics because advances in neuroscience have ethical implications for how we live.

I have also been working in neuroaesthetics for over twenty years. When I started in the late nineties, there was almost nothing in the scientific literature on this topic. If you look at the publication rates in neuroaesthetics and neuroarchitecture, there was an inflection about ten years ago where the field started to take off.

Susan is the founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab, a pioneering neuroaesthetics initiative from the Pedersen Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Her work lies at the intersection of brain sciences and the arts and how our unique response to aesthetic experiences can amplify human potential. She is the co-author of Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us with Ivy Ross, Vice President for Hardware Design at Google. 

Susan is also the designer of the Impact Thinking model, an evidence-based research approach to accelerate how we use the arts to solve problems in health, wellbeing, and learning. In addition to her role at IAM Lab, she also serves as co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint project in partnership with the Aspen Institute.

Natalia Olszewska: What’s your story, Susan? When did you start to think about the brain, art, and architecture?

Susan Magsamen: When I was little, my twin sister had a farming accident where she almost lost her leg. We were always close, and it was very traumatic for us both. It separated us because she had to stay home for a year, and I had to go out into the world without her. And what was crazy about that is that I’m an introvert, and she’s an extrovert, so our roles were reversed.

Before the accident, my sister wasn’t an artist, but she started making art partly because she was bored. She also realized that she had a deep fear from trauma stuck inside of her. And she couldn’t talk about it because there were no words to express it. At that time, fifty years ago, we didn’t know much about Broca’s area of the brain and how it can shut down because of trauma.