Second Session: The Neuroarchitecture of Dignity

What Neuroscience Teaches Us About Shelter, Space & Healing

Clark University • October 30, 2025

Speakers:

Donald H. Ruggles, AIA, NCARB, ANFA, HAPI, ICAA, is CEO Emeritus of Ruggles Mabe Studio, Denver. Author of Beauty, Neuroscience & Architecture and producer of Built Beautiful, he serves as Director of Classical Studies at CU Denver co-founded the Design/HEALth Initiative and sits on multiple design and health boards.

Minar Thapa Magar is a National Coordinator for the Sindh Housing Recovery and Reconstruction Platform (SHRRP), supporting the Government of Sindh, Pakistan in rebuilding 2.1 million homes and recovering 50,000 settlements. As Technical Advisor at Catholic Relief Services (CRS), he brings 10+ years of experience in disaster recovery and reduction, shelter and housing, settlements approach, system strengthening and coordination

Ana Carolina Helena is an architect (WELL AP) with experience in private, public, and humanitarian sectors. Based in Luxembourg City with the Luxembourg Red Cross - Shelter Research Unit (SRU), supporting construction projects in Africa, Ukraine, and Nepal. Focused on sustainable, health-promoting architecture and its environmental, socio-economic, and public health co-benefits.

Facilitator:

Dr. Devora Neumark is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher and co-founder of Home Ground Lab. With over 30 years of leadership in academia, policy, and creative practice, they advance beauty as essential infrastructure in displacement contexts, combining participatory art, contemplative practice, and policy to promote climate justice, community resilience, dignity, and social innovation.

Architectural image that combines pleasure and survival patterns resulting in a neurologically stressful design. The Port House in Antwerp. Antwerp, Belgium.

Photo: Tim Fisher, undated

Summary

Note: This webinar was facilitated by Dr. Devora Neumark, with Stephanie Acker serving as co-host.

The second session of the three-part webinar series Beauty, Art, Belonging and the Neuroscience of Place, held on October 30, 2025, examined what neuroscience teaches us about shelter, space, and healing through three distinct but converging contributions. Donald Ruggles, drawing on a chapter co-authored with Natalie Richi for the Routledge Handbook of Neuroscience and the Built Environment, argued that non-beautiful spaces are not merely unpleasant but constitute measurable stress environments with physiological consequences including chronic inflammation, cardiovascular disease risk, and compromised immune function, and proposed reframing beauty as pleasure to sidestep institutional resistance. Minar Thapa Magar described how owner-driven reconstruction in flood-affected Sindh, Pakistan, combining flood-resilient building standards with traditional ralli textile patterns, spread spontaneously across communities like wildfire, with over one million homes rebuilt by residents themselves using modest financial support and technical guidance. Ana Carolina Helena presented a shelter prototype developed for refugee camps in eastern Chad that was designed to evolve with communities through protracted displacement and candidly noted that her team never used the word beauty at any decision-making table, instead advancing aesthetic quality through arguments about sustainable construction, biophilic design, and preventive healthcare. The session concluded with a rich exchange in which all three speakers addressed how to make the case for beauty to institutional decision-makers.

The Luxembourg Red Cross shelter prototypes emphasize a sustainable construction and biophilic design that support mental and physical wellbeing in refugee camps in Eastern Chad. Evolutive shelters in Eastern Chad. Chad.

Photo: Luxembourg Red Cross. 2025

Key Takeaways

Donald Ruggles, Ruggles Mabe Studio / CU Denver

Non-beautiful spaces are not merely unpleasant but constitute measurable stress environments with serious physiological consequences. Donald Ruggles argued that the brain processes 11 million bits of information per second and categorises environmental inputs into two fundamental pattern types: exciting patterns that activate sympathetic survival responses, and beautiful patterns that activate parasympathetic pleasure responses. When spaces are devoid of harmony, proportion, and natural materials, the sympathetic nervous system dominates, raising heart rate, elevating blood pressure, narrowing mental focus, and triggering chronic inflammation, which Ruggles described as a newly understood driver of cancer and cardiovascular disease. For architects and designers working in displacement contexts to remain unaware of this evidence, he argued, is professional malpractice.
A healthy nervous system requires balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic inputs, a state known as homeostasis, and the built environment is one of the most powerful levers available for achieving or disrupting that balance. Ruggles demonstrated that survival patterns are five to seven times neurologically stronger than pleasure patterns, which means that chaotic or threatening environments overwhelm the restorative effects of beauty with relatively little effort. In displacement contexts where residents are already carrying chronic stress from trauma, loss, and uncertainty, this imbalance is not a background condition but an active impediment to recovery that thoughtful design can directly address.
Institutional resistance to beauty in humanitarian design often stems from the word itself, which carries associations with luxury, subjectivity, and superficiality. Ruggles proposed a practical reframe: replace beauty with pleasure and ask instead whether we want to create environments that are pleasurable for the people who inhabit them. This linguistic shift makes the neurological and physiological argument harder to dismiss, grounding what might otherwise seem like an aesthetic preference in the language of health, well-being, and biological necessity that decision-makers and donors are more likely to fund and prioritise.

Minar Thapa Magar, Catholic Relief Services / Sindh Housing Recovery and Reconstruction Platform

Owner-driven reconstruction in flood-affected Sindh, Pakistan demonstrated that when communities are trusted with the resources and technical guidance to rebuild their own homes, beauty emerges not as an add-on but as an intrinsic expression of belonging and resilience. With modest financial support of approximately one thousand dollars per household and training in flood-resilient construction techniques, over one million families rebuilt their homes themselves, integrating traditional ralli textile patterns, coloured wall paintings, and culturally meaningful designs. When a few houses began adopting these patterns, the practice spread spontaneously across entire settlements like wildfire, driven entirely by community initiative rather than external instruction.
The act of marking one’s rebuilt home with colour, pattern, and cultural identity is not decorative but a celebration of survival and a reclamation of dignity. Minar Thapa Magar described a 62-year-old resident who, upon completing his rebuilt home, described it as the house he had dreamed of his entire life, one he was certain would withstand future floods. The artwork on his walls represented not mere embellishment but a lifetime’s achievement and the relief of a journey completed. A structure without this emotional attachment, Magar observed, is lifeless: it is four walls, but it is not a home.
Participatory design processes that genuinely engage women and children produce more inclusive, culturally grounded, and meaningful recovery outcomes than top-down standardised approaches. In Sindh, focus art group sessions with children revealed that girls prioritised social spaces with flowers, trees, and hopscotch areas while boys gravitated toward physical games, and that a planned sealed playground needed to include a muddy area where children could play freely. Women’s groups designed community centres with shaded gathering spaces suited to the extreme heat and local social practices. These community-led design inputs transformed what might have been generic infrastructure into spaces that residents felt genuine ownership over and would maintain and invest in over time.

Carolina Helena, Luxembourg Red Cross Shelter Research Unit

Beauty in humanitarian shelter design can be advanced most effectively not by arguing for beauty directly but by reframing it in terms that institutional decision-makers already value: sustainable construction, biophilic design, and preventive healthcare. Carolina Helena candidly acknowledged that throughout the entire development of the Luxembourg Red Cross shelter prototype for refugee camps in eastern Chad, her team never once used the word beauty at any decision-making table. Instead, they made the case through arguments about biobased materials that reduce environmental impact, locally sourced compressed earth blocks that remind residents of homes in Sudan and generate hope, passive ventilation and thermal control that reduce trauma-related anxiety, and symmetric facade design that activates parasympathetic responses. The project achieved dignity and beauty precisely because the team found the language that opened institutional doors.
The Chad shelter prototype demonstrated that thoughtful design choices can create dignified, culturally meaningful, and climate-responsive environments without significant additional cost, provided those choices are made at the design and material specification stage rather than added as afterthoughts. The prototype was conceived as an evolutive shelter, designed to follow households from emergency through transitional to more permanent phases, reusing materials across stages as camps increasingly became permanent villages. Compressed earth blocks using local construction techniques familiar to Sudanese refugees gave residents both structural resilience and a sensory connection to the lives they had before displacement and could still have after it.
The humanitarian sector faces a critical challenge in translating compelling qualitative evidence about beauty’s impact into the quantitative data that institutional decision-makers require. Carolina Helena observed that evaluation in humanitarian settings typically relies on self-reported satisfaction, where a simple yes from residents is considered sufficient evidence of success, leaving no rigorous basis for demonstrating the correlation between aesthetic quality and health, resilience, and dignity outcomes. She noted that while evidence for beauty’s physical health impacts can be extrapolated from studies in other contexts, the mental health dimensions remain under-researched in humanitarian settings specifically, and raised the provocative question of whether the World Health Organisation’s recent addition of urban living as a risk factor for depression might itself be partly explained by the systematic failure to build beautifully.

Implications for Practitioners

Reframe beauty as pleasure, health, and sustainability to overcome institutional resistance: Humanitarian architects, shelter coordinators, and programme designers should learn to translate the case for beauty into the languages that institutional gatekeepers already respond to: pleasure rather than aesthetics, preventive healthcare rather than dignity, and sustainable construction rather than cultural expression. Following Carolina Helena’s experience in Chad, where beauty was never named at any decision-making table yet was achieved through every design choice, practitioners should develop a fluency in multiple argumentative registers, deploying whichever framing is most likely to open doors in a given institutional context without compromising the underlying commitment to dignified, culturally meaningful design.
Treat the built environment as a public health intervention and advocate accordingly: Architects, planners, and humanitarian designers should actively position aesthetic design decisions as public health interventions, drawing on Donald Ruggles’ evidence that non-beautiful spaces activate chronic sympathetic stress responses with measurable consequences including inflammation, cardiovascular disease risk, and compromised immune function. Framing shelter quality as preventive healthcare, and making the case that investment in aesthetic design reduces downstream health costs, provides a compelling and evidence-based argument for donors, governmental bodies, and institutional decision-makers who may be unmoved by appeals to dignity or cultural expression alone.
Trust communities to define and enact beauty in their own reconstruction: Reconstruction actors, shelter designers, and disaster recovery organisations should adopt owner-driven approaches that provide communities with the resources, technical guidance, and genuine autonomy to rebuild in ways that reflect their own cultural identities and aesthetic values, following the Sindh model where traditional ralli textile patterns spread spontaneously across over one million rebuilt homes without any external instruction. When communities are trusted as the authors of their own built environments, beauty emerges organically as an expression of belonging, resilience, and cultural continuity rather than as an externally imposed standard.
Design shelters as evolutive environments that accompany communities through protracted displacement: Humanitarian designers and shelter coordinators should move away from emergency shelters conceived as short-term solutions and toward evolutive models that are designed from the outset to follow households through successive phases of displacement, reusing materials and adapting structures as needs change and as camps increasingly become permanent settlements. The Luxembourg Red Cross prototype in Chad demonstrated that this approach can be achieved within tight budget constraints through careful material specification, locally sourced construction techniques, and design choices that simultaneously address climate resilience, cultural familiarity, and neurological comfort.
Build the quantitative evidence base that links aesthetic design to measurable health and resilience outcomes: Researchers, evaluators, and humanitarian practitioners should collaborate to generate rigorous quantitative evidence demonstrating the correlation between aesthetic design quality and health, resilience, dignity, and community cohesion outcomes in displacement contexts. As Carolina Helena observed, current evaluation in humanitarian settings relies primarily on self-reported satisfaction, leaving no robust basis for making the institutional case for beauty. Closing this evidence gap, particularly on the mental health dimensions that remain under-researched in humanitarian settings, is one of the most consequential contributions that researchers working at the intersection of neuroaesthetics, architecture, and forced migration could make to the field.

The Sindh Housing Recovery and Reconstruction Platform supported owner-driven and dignified reconstruction following floods in Sindh Pakistan. Overall description. A family in front of their home. Sindh, Pakistan.

Photo: Catholic Relief Services (CRS), 2025