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Dr. Jan C. Bentz
Why our buildings need “wellness”—but not in the way you think.
One of the most revealing facts of contemporary architecture is that it now has to advertise itself as “human-centered.” The phrase appears everywhere: in design briefs, in developer brochures, in conference panels—often alongside talk of wellness, biophilia, and smart environments. ‘Flagship projects’ such as the Google Bay View Campus present themselves in precisely these terms, emphasizing natural light, fresh air, and the integration of greenery into the workplace. The ambition is clear: to create environments that are healthier, more humane, more attuned to those who inhabit them. Yet the very need to articulate these aims so explicitly suggests a deeper unease. A building in Rome or Florence rarely needs to explain that it is meant for human beings. One enters, and the point becomes immediately clear. This leads to a strange paradox: the more insistently architecture claims to serve the human being, the more one wonders why this reassurance has become necessary. The new vocabulary reads less like a discovery and more like a remedy. Wellness architecture promises healthier interiors—better air, more light, improved acoustics—precisely because many contemporary environments have proven harsh, fatiguing, or disorienting, in effect lacking these qualities to begin with. Biophilic design introduces plants, water features, and natural materials into offices and hospitals, an attempt to soften spaces dominated by glass, steel, and synthetic finishes. Even the enthusiasm for artificial intelligence in design—presented as a way to optimize layouts and free up ‘creative energy’—suggests that architecture has become deeply entangled with optimization of ‘living’. What was once inherent to building—light, air, proportion, and a sense of place—now appears as something to be deliberately reintroduced; by an algorithm nontheless. The cause of this condition is not easily reduced to a single movement or figure. It may, however, be understood in part alongside a broader shift that also shaped modern art where function, structure, and experience come to be treated as separable problems. The result is not necessarily a failure of design, but a fragmentation of it. What once emerged as a unified form must now be reconstructed through technical and conceptual means. At this point, Hans Sedlmayr enters the conversation with surprising force. In the chapter “Analogia Morbi,” of his book Art in Crisis he describes modern art as a field of symptoms—signs of a deeper disturbance in the human condition. The term analogia morbi—an “analogy of illness”—refers to the idea that the forms of art exhibit symptoms comparable to those found in a diseased organism. Art, in this sense, does not merely reflect external changes; it reveals inner disturbances in the structure of human life itself. When architecture becomes abstract, cold, rootless, or fragmented, these are not neutral aesthetic choices. He identifies tendencies toward “pure” spheres, toward abstraction, toward a “hankering after the inorganic,” toward a “detachment from the solid earth,” and a movement “away from man and from all that pertains to man and measure.” His central diagnosis—the “loss of the mean”—points to a displacement of the human centre. Architecture renders this diagnosis visible. Buildings do not remain theoretical; they shape habits, expectations, and moods.
The Cult of Purity and the Inorganic Drift
One of Sedlmayr’s first observations concerns the rise of “pure” spheres. In architecture, this manifests as a pursuit of clarity through reduction. Surfaces are stripped, materials limited, forms simplified. The aesthetic finds a canonical expression in the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose maxim “less is more” captures the ambition to achieve elegance through restraint. The Seagram Building presents a façade of disciplined repetition—bronze and glass arranged in a strict grid, each element subordinated to an overall order. The result can be striking. It can also become monotonous. A visitor entering a typical contemporary office tower often encounters a sequence of spaces that differ little from one another: open-plan floors, standardized meeting rooms, neutral finishes. The design reads clearly. It offers little to dwell on. Purity works well in chemistry. It tends to produce rather austere results in architecture. Sedlmayr’s second observation deepens the point. He speaks of a “progressive hankering after the inorganic.” Modern architecture has developed an unmistakable preference for materials and forms associated with hardness, smoothness, and abstraction. Glass, steel, and concrete dominate. Surfaces resist touch. Repetition replaces variation. Consider the Barbican Estate, where concrete mass and repetition create a powerful yet austere environment. Walking through the complex, one encounters elevated walkways, repeated textures, and carefully framed views. The experience can feel impressive. It can also feel remote, particularly in muted light. Sedlmayr’s remark that modern building is “growing increasingly colder” becomes intelligible here. Coldness need not be taken literally. It refers to a reduction of sensory engagement. A façade such as that of the Florence Cathedral invites the eye to follow patterns, colors, and joints. A glass façade often reflects the sky and neighboring buildings, offering a shifting image that remains at a distance. Many contemporary buildings reward a quick glance. Fewer reward sustained attention.
Earthlessness and the Disappearance of Man
A third symptom follows: “detachment from the solid earth.” In many global cities, buildings appear interchangeable. A tower designed in London could stand with minimal alteration in Dubai or Singapore. Climate control systems, standardized materials, and global supply chains enable this mobility. The result is a kind of architectural neutrality. The building functions independently of its surroundings. It requires little from its context and offers little in return. Earlier architecture presents a different relationship. The Palazzo Medici Riccardi belongs unmistakably to Florence—its rusticated stone, its proportions, its relation to the street all reflect a specific urban and cultural context. The Palazzo Vecchio stands as both a political and architectural expression of the city that produced it. Such buildings do not simply occupy space. They participate in it. Older buildings belong somewhere. New ones often arrive. Sedlmayr’s claim that modern art tends to give “an inferior status to man” becomes evident in everyday environments. Consider the open-plan office, designed to maximize flexibility and collaboration. Rows of desks stretch across large floors, often under uniform lighting. Acoustic panels attempt to manage noise. The layout supports efficiency. It can also generate fatigue, as workers struggle to find quiet or privacy. Large transit hubs prioritize flow. The concourses of major airports move thousands of passengers efficiently. Signage directs movement, seating areas are arranged for turnover, and retail spaces line the paths. The traveler is guided, processed, and moved along. The system works. The experience rarely lingers. A building can process thousands of people without ever really receiving one.
Orientation suffers alongside this shift. Glass towers often repeat the same façade from ground to roof. Entrances are indicated by subtle shifts in transparency or signage. Inside, floors may differ only by numbering. Orientation requires effort. Earlier architecture tended to guide perception more explicitly. The progression from street to entrance to interior involved thresholds: steps, arches, doors, vestibules. In the Stanza della Segnatura, the arrangement of frescoes and architectural framing directs the viewer’s attention across the room, establishing relationships between wall, ceiling, and floor. Even in contemporary Oxford, the entrance to the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities employs arches and mouldings that signal arrival. The form indicates where to enter. The detail supports the structure. Architecture becomes easier to read when it offers such cues.
Ornament, Attention, and the Recovery of the Mean
At this point, the question of “ornament” returns with renewed force. In many modern buildings, detail is minimized in favor of smooth surfaces and continuous materials. Joints are concealed, transitions simplified. The effect can appear clean. It can also appear unfinished, as though the building has been reduced to its structural outline. Ornament provides articulation. It marks edges, emphasizes transitions, and invites the eye to move across a surface. In the façades of Renaissance palaces, window frames, cornices, and rustication create layers of meaning. In Gothic architecture, tracery and carving extend structural lines into patterns that guide perception. Ornament requires time and skill. It demands decisions at a scale smaller than the overall form. It reflects attention. Ornament is what happens when a building is taken seriously. This seriousness can be observed in both historical and contemporary examples. Traditional stone carving in Florence continues to support restoration and new construction. Recent interest in crafted materials—such as mass timber structures in Vienna or Zurich—indicates a renewed attention to texture and joinery. Adaptive reuse projects that preserve historical fabric while introducing new functions demonstrate how continuity can be maintained; the Tate Modern offers a familiar example, where industrial material meets contemporary use without erasing memory. The contemporary emphasis on wellness and biophilic design can now be read as a response to the conditions described above. Architects introduce plants, natural light, and varied materials to counteract the uniformity of many modern interiors. Offices incorporate terraces, green walls, and informal seating areas to encourage interaction and rest. These interventions improve experience. They also highlight an underlying issue: the building requires supplementation. We now install plants in buildings to remind ourselves that we once knew how to build in a garden. Sedlmayr’s “loss of the mean” describes a condition in which architecture moves toward extremes: toward abstraction, toward efficiency, toward material dominance, toward system. A recovery would involve rebalancing these tendencies. Architecture will recover when it addresses the full range of human experience: practical, perceptual, and symbolic. Efficiency remains necessary. It does not define the whole. We have learned how to build efficiently. The question remains whether we still know how to build well. The remedy lies closer than we may want to admit. Classical architecture persists as a standing demonstration of what it means to build well. In Rome, in Vienna, Paris, and Oxford, one finds buildings that do not require the language of “wellness” or “human-centered design,” because they were conceived from the outset with the human being as their measure. They do not add beauty after the fact; they are beautiful in their very structure. The contrast is instructive. Architecture does not need more systems, more corrections, or more carefully managed environments. It needs to recover its center. And once that center is restored, much of what we now struggle to reintroduce will follow of its own accord.
One of the most revealing facts of contemporary architecture is that it now has to advertise itself as “human-centered.” The phrase appears everywhere: in design briefs, in developer brochures, in conference panels—often alongside talk of wellness, biophilia, and smart environments. ‘Flagship projects’ such as the Google Bay View Campus present themselves in precisely these terms, emphasizing natural light, fresh air, and the integration of greenery into the workplace. The ambition is clear: to create environments that are healthier, more humane, more attuned to those who inhabit them. Yet the very need to articulate these aims so explicitly suggests a deeper unease. A building in Rome or Florence rarely needs to explain that it is meant for human beings. One enters, and the point becomes immediately clear. This leads to a strange paradox: the more insistently architecture claims to serve the human being, the more one wonders why this reassurance has become necessary. The new vocabulary reads less like a discovery and more like a remedy. Wellness architecture promises healthier interiors—better air, more light, improved acoustics—precisely because many contemporary environments have proven harsh, fatiguing, or disorienting, in effect lacking these qualities to begin with. Biophilic design introduces plants, water features, and natural materials into offices and hospitals, an attempt to soften spaces dominated by glass, steel, and synthetic finishes. Even the enthusiasm for artificial intelligence in design—presented as a way to optimize layouts and free up ‘creative energy’—suggests that architecture has become deeply entangled with optimization of ‘living’. What was once inherent to building—light, air, proportion, and a sense of place—now appears as something to be deliberately reintroduced; by an algorithm nontheless. The cause of this condition is not easily reduced to a single movement or figure. It may, however, be understood in part alongside a broader shift that also shaped modern art where function, structure, and experience come to be treated as separable problems. The result is not necessarily a failure of design, but a fragmentation of it. What once emerged as a unified form must now be reconstructed through technical and conceptual means. At this point, Hans Sedlmayr enters the conversation with surprising force. In the chapter “Analogia Morbi,” of his book Art in Crisis he describes modern art as a field of symptoms—signs of a deeper disturbance in the human condition. The term analogia morbi—an “analogy of illness”—refers to the idea that the forms of art exhibit symptoms comparable to those found in a diseased organism. Art, in this sense, does not merely reflect external changes; it reveals inner disturbances in the structure of human life itself. When architecture becomes abstract, cold, rootless, or fragmented, these are not neutral aesthetic choices. He identifies tendencies toward “pure” spheres, toward abstraction, toward a “hankering after the inorganic,” toward a “detachment from the solid earth,” and a movement “away from man and from all that pertains to man and measure.” His central diagnosis—the “loss of the mean”—points to a displacement of the human centre. Architecture renders this diagnosis visible. Buildings do not remain theoretical; they shape habits, expectations, and moods.
The Cult of Purity and the Inorganic Drift
One of Sedlmayr’s first observations concerns the rise of “pure” spheres. In architecture, this manifests as a pursuit of clarity through reduction. Surfaces are stripped, materials limited, forms simplified. The aesthetic finds a canonical expression in the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, whose maxim “less is more” captures the ambition to achieve elegance through restraint. The Seagram Building presents a façade of disciplined repetition—bronze and glass arranged in a strict grid, each element subordinated to an overall order. The result can be striking. It can also become monotonous. A visitor entering a typical contemporary office tower often encounters a sequence of spaces that differ little from one another: open-plan floors, standardized meeting rooms, neutral finishes. The design reads clearly. It offers little to dwell on. Purity works well in chemistry. It tends to produce rather austere results in architecture. Sedlmayr’s second observation deepens the point. He speaks of a “progressive hankering after the inorganic.” Modern architecture has developed an unmistakable preference for materials and forms associated with hardness, smoothness, and abstraction. Glass, steel, and concrete dominate. Surfaces resist touch. Repetition replaces variation. Consider the Barbican Estate, where concrete mass and repetition create a powerful yet austere environment. Walking through the complex, one encounters elevated walkways, repeated textures, and carefully framed views. The experience can feel impressive. It can also feel remote, particularly in muted light. Sedlmayr’s remark that modern building is “growing increasingly colder” becomes intelligible here. Coldness need not be taken literally. It refers to a reduction of sensory engagement. A façade such as that of the Florence Cathedral invites the eye to follow patterns, colors, and joints. A glass façade often reflects the sky and neighboring buildings, offering a shifting image that remains at a distance. Many contemporary buildings reward a quick glance. Fewer reward sustained attention.
Earthlessness and the Disappearance of Man
A third symptom follows: “detachment from the solid earth.” In many global cities, buildings appear interchangeable. A tower designed in London could stand with minimal alteration in Dubai or Singapore. Climate control systems, standardized materials, and global supply chains enable this mobility. The result is a kind of architectural neutrality. The building functions independently of its surroundings. It requires little from its context and offers little in return. Earlier architecture presents a different relationship. The Palazzo Medici Riccardi belongs unmistakably to Florence—its rusticated stone, its proportions, its relation to the street all reflect a specific urban and cultural context. The Palazzo Vecchio stands as both a political and architectural expression of the city that produced it. Such buildings do not simply occupy space. They participate in it. Older buildings belong somewhere. New ones often arrive. Sedlmayr’s claim that modern art tends to give “an inferior status to man” becomes evident in everyday environments. Consider the open-plan office, designed to maximize flexibility and collaboration. Rows of desks stretch across large floors, often under uniform lighting. Acoustic panels attempt to manage noise. The layout supports efficiency. It can also generate fatigue, as workers struggle to find quiet or privacy. Large transit hubs prioritize flow. The concourses of major airports move thousands of passengers efficiently. Signage directs movement, seating areas are arranged for turnover, and retail spaces line the paths. The traveler is guided, processed, and moved along. The system works. The experience rarely lingers. A building can process thousands of people without ever really receiving one.
Orientation suffers alongside this shift. Glass towers often repeat the same façade from ground to roof. Entrances are indicated by subtle shifts in transparency or signage. Inside, floors may differ only by numbering. Orientation requires effort. Earlier architecture tended to guide perception more explicitly. The progression from street to entrance to interior involved thresholds: steps, arches, doors, vestibules. In the Stanza della Segnatura, the arrangement of frescoes and architectural framing directs the viewer’s attention across the room, establishing relationships between wall, ceiling, and floor. Even in contemporary Oxford, the entrance to the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities employs arches and mouldings that signal arrival. The form indicates where to enter. The detail supports the structure. Architecture becomes easier to read when it offers such cues.
Ornament, Attention, and the Recovery of the Mean
At this point, the question of “ornament” returns with renewed force. In many modern buildings, detail is minimized in favor of smooth surfaces and continuous materials. Joints are concealed, transitions simplified. The effect can appear clean. It can also appear unfinished, as though the building has been reduced to its structural outline. Ornament provides articulation. It marks edges, emphasizes transitions, and invites the eye to move across a surface. In the façades of Renaissance palaces, window frames, cornices, and rustication create layers of meaning. In Gothic architecture, tracery and carving extend structural lines into patterns that guide perception. Ornament requires time and skill. It demands decisions at a scale smaller than the overall form. It reflects attention. Ornament is what happens when a building is taken seriously. This seriousness can be observed in both historical and contemporary examples. Traditional stone carving in Florence continues to support restoration and new construction. Recent interest in crafted materials—such as mass timber structures in Vienna or Zurich—indicates a renewed attention to texture and joinery. Adaptive reuse projects that preserve historical fabric while introducing new functions demonstrate how continuity can be maintained; the Tate Modern offers a familiar example, where industrial material meets contemporary use without erasing memory. The contemporary emphasis on wellness and biophilic design can now be read as a response to the conditions described above. Architects introduce plants, natural light, and varied materials to counteract the uniformity of many modern interiors. Offices incorporate terraces, green walls, and informal seating areas to encourage interaction and rest. These interventions improve experience. They also highlight an underlying issue: the building requires supplementation. We now install plants in buildings to remind ourselves that we once knew how to build in a garden. Sedlmayr’s “loss of the mean” describes a condition in which architecture moves toward extremes: toward abstraction, toward efficiency, toward material dominance, toward system. A recovery would involve rebalancing these tendencies. Architecture will recover when it addresses the full range of human experience: practical, perceptual, and symbolic. Efficiency remains necessary. It does not define the whole. We have learned how to build efficiently. The question remains whether we still know how to build well. The remedy lies closer than we may want to admit. Classical architecture persists as a standing demonstration of what it means to build well. In Rome, in Vienna, Paris, and Oxford, one finds buildings that do not require the language of “wellness” or “human-centered design,” because they were conceived from the outset with the human being as their measure. They do not add beauty after the fact; they are beautiful in their very structure. The contrast is instructive. Architecture does not need more systems, more corrections, or more carefully managed environments. It needs to recover its center. And once that center is restored, much of what we now struggle to reintroduce will follow of its own accord.