Denver Film “Built Beautiful” Examines Ties between Human Brains and Architecture

Story by Robert Davis

Photos Courtesy of Courtesy of “Built Beautiful an architecture and neuroscience love story”

A feature-length documentary premiering at the 2020 Denver Film Festival examines our unconscious responses to a city’s built form and how architecture impacts our health and well-being.

“Built Beautiful” by Mariel Rodriguez-McGill took two years to finish and was inspired by “Beauty, Neuroscience & Architecture: Timeless Patterns & Their Impact on Our Well-Being,” a book by Denver architect Donald Ruggles.

“Humans spend nearly all of our time around the built environment in some way,” Rodriguez-McGill told the Denver Voice in an interview. “So, it’s really important to understand how we react to it. And [Ruggle’s] book forced me to take a new look at the buildings in downtown Denver and the houses across the city.”

The film is Rodriguez-McGill’s first appearance at the Denver Film Festival and the result of more than 10 years of filmmaking experience, she said. She came to Denver in 2008 to earn her master’s degree in film and quickly fell in love with documentary filmmaking after she produced a documentary short on Denver’s food truck scene called “Food Trucks: Feasting on Four Wheels.”

After graduating, she worked at Rocky Mountain PBS, where she produced and directed the historical documentary series “Colorado Experience,” before moving on to become the deputy film director of Colorado’s Office of International Trade. Rodriguez-McGill moved to New York to study documentary journalism at Columbia University over the summer.

While filming, Rodriguez-Gill discovered that several elements of cities remained the same no matter which side of the world they were on. At one point in the film, students in schools in Oxford, UK and Denver were asked to draw a home. Each student drew buildings containing what neuroscientists call the primal form—human facial features unconsciously drawn into renderings of nonhuman objects.

“We thought: if we can get neuroscientists to spend some of their time wondering about the spaces they are working in, then maybe [architects] can pull something familiar with that,” Meredith Banasiak says in the film.

Banasiak is the director of research for Boulder Associates, and Nan Ellin, dean of CU Denver’s school of architecture

“It’s interesting to see what people around the world are looking for in buildings. They’re looking for a way to connect, and they all share similar ideas,” she said.

While the connection between our brains and architecture is something scientists are still trying to fully understand, researchers and academics like Meredith Banasiak, director of research for Boulder Associates, and Nan Ellin, dean of CU Denver’s school of architecture, uses the early research to teach students about the importance of people-centric architecture. That means designing buildings across physical, sensory, and cognitive abilities.

“We thought: if we can get neuroscientists to spend some of their time wondering about the spaces they are working in, then maybe [architects] can pull something familiar with that,” Banasiak says in the film.

Rodriguez-McGill points to the Alpas Memory Center outside of Philadelphia as an example of how these ideas can coalesce into a functional building. The business serves people in cognitive decline or with substance abuse issues, but the building’s design serves everyone. It’s a building-in-the-round with an interior nature courtyard so that patients can safely interact with nature with no possibility of getting lost in the process.

While the film does not discuss the homeless experience directly, Rodriguez-McGill says there are several ways this field informs it. Namely, the impact of cities on individual stress levels.

“There are many aspects that are important to consider. If certain things in someone’s element causes their brain to consistently be in fight-or-flight mode, then they will experience increased stress, which in turn negatively impacts their health.”

When asked what Denver could do to in terms of design to help its unhoused, Rodriguez-McGill offered a simple yet succinct answer: build inviting buildings. During her research for the film, she found evidence that high-rise buildings with first floors encased in cement are less inviting than ones with shops and interesting features.

“I hope this film encourages viewers to think about the city they live in in a different way, as an educational tool to remind us we need to consider neuroscience in city planning,” she said.  

To read more about the film or purchase tickets: https://watch.eventive.org/dff/play/5f6e492652092300afeb3227