Locker Group’s range of perforated metal offers excellent materials for building façades, and make no mistake, this is one of the most important design elements of your project.

Cognitive scientists have proved buildings can affect the mood and feelings of well-being in humans, thanks to specially attuned cells in the hippocampus (a complex brain structure).

In coming years, these psychology-based insights could begin to play a major role in how cities are designed. In the meantime, it’s worth considering how your building will fit, not just into its location, but into the hearts and minds of those who will interact with it.

In his 2015 book Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life, Colin Ellard (a cognitive neuroscientist) describes an experiment he undertook in a suburb of New York’s Lower East Side. Ellard walked small groups of people around a partially gentrified neighbourhood and found that his subjects were unhappy and bored when faced with modern, slab-like structures with little creativity exercised in façade design.

Furthermore, pre-eminent urbanist Jan Gehl has observed that people will increase their walking speed when passing a blank building facade.

While this is an extremely brief example of how buildings can affect people, the implications of these studies suggest an increased need for more human-centric façade design.

While certain design theories may point to individual methods for adding a human touch, there is no single guaranteed feature that will make a façade more interesting to humans. The flip side to this is there are no hard and fast rules. An architect has a lot to juggle, and a facade needs to do many things. Getting creative with a façade will lead to a greater engagement from those who use the building, and more positive feelings and associations for those who live in the area. Locker can provide perforated metal manufactured to any specification, meaning the only limit is your imagination.

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