Interview with Ambient Creative
Interview with Leigh-Anne Gemson from Ambient Creative. Leigh-Anne is a photographer, art director and like us at Post Swim Feeling, an enthusiast of all things to encourage happiness, wellbeing and human flourishing. Leigh-Anne asked me three questions to get the conversation rolling.
LG - What do yoga and architecture have in common with each other? How are they connected?
PSF - Yoga is another way we can shift our emotional and mental states. It is a practice that gives us an opportunity to create our own inner stillness and peace, a reprieve from emails, phones and traffic. In yoga we find grounding in the awareness of our physical and emotional bodies. In architecture that grounding can come from an awareness of our surroundings.
No matter how we find it, I am interested in this inquiry of happiness and human flourishing. My office is called Post Swim Feeling because for me that feeling comes from a swim in the sea.
I lived away from the ocean for over a decade and ‘post swim feeling’ became the term used to describe that sense of vitality, joy and wellbeing after an experience; a sauna, a mountain walk, a yoga class. The nostalgic strings of home for the very specific sensory drenching that the Indian ocean offers me.
LG - In your view, what is the function or purpose of architecture in today's society?
PSF - I think the role of architecture is now as it has always been, to enable people to improve the quality of their lives. That could mean the provision of basic shelter or creating spaces to stimulate human flourishing. I have worked in the favellas in Brazil, public projects in Berlin and on high end projects in Zurich and the essence of the approach is always the same. How can I enable the occupant to live a better life, how can I make them feel happier, healthier, more aligned with their purpose. It is now possible to collect physiological data such as heart rate, blood pressure and brain activity in response to built environments. This new field is called neuroarchitecture and it’s aim is to provide an empirical framework for creating environments that can optimise human behaviour, health and wellbeing. So our hunches and theories about what elements are required to make an architecture which improves human health and wellbeing are now backed up with scientific data.
LG - What is your starting point for an architectural project? How do you approach a new project? Both architecture and yoga affect how we feel, one from the inside out and the other from the outside in. In architecture, we are affected by the many qualities of space; light, sound, colour, texture and smell. When there is space, light and order in our surroundings, our emotional and mental states tend to reciprocate these qualities.
PSF - The starting point for all projects is getting to know the client. We want to know how they live. Their routines, their preferences, their stories. We create a story board of rituals in their day, how they take their coffee in the morning, where they sit for breakfast, whether they linger or rush. The commute to work, their arrival home, any moments of pause, textures of satisfaction. From here we get an idea of their story, their preferences, their dreams.
From this conversation we work on possibilities of inserting more beauty, more consciouness, more joy into the narrative of their everyday.
There is always a budget, and very early on in the project we decide how we will spread it. We don’t want an evenly spread piece of toast so to speak but rather one with very obvious dollops of fat. And this spreading of the fat is really informed by the dream list and the storyboard of what narrative we are intending to improve.