The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness

The Great Indoors is a relentlessly optimistic pop-science book about the possibility of better buildings that manages to use a lot of words to say a little. Anthes interviews academics, architects, and operators across a variety of buildings, but primarily institutions like hospitals, schools, prisons, and offices (wait, I have a quote for this one)*, to record that basically, we like nature, badly placed stairs break communication and contribute to poor health, and contrary to the official desire for observable visibility, people like privacy.

I have to admire her persistence in securing these interviews, but there’s very little assessment of any of it. The whole book feels like a series of chipper Atlas Obscura articles. While it’s pretty clear that bad buildings can damage lives, it’s less clear that great buildings can improve them. Compared to something like Brand’s How Buildings Learn, this book just comes off poorly.

*As Foucault said, “Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”