Reach 2025: A New Era of Building Design
By Mark Witten
Illustrations by Alex Antonescu
How an unlikely collaboration between microbiome scientists and architects is reshaping building design for human health.
Humans spend an average of 90 per cent of their lives indoors, according to The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS). That means built environments can greatly influence and shape our microbiome – the microbes that live on and within humans – for better or for worse.
Recognizing this profound impact, researchers are working at the intersection of human health and architecture to explore ways to design healthier spaces. This includes CIFAR researcher Thomas Bosch, a Fellow in the Humans & the Microbiome program.
For Bosch, the wake-up call for a paradigm shift in his work happened when he first met Columbia University architects Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina while on a research sabbatical in Berlin in 2019.
“We spent nearly a year together talking about how modern buildings and urban environments have contributed to a profound reduction in the microbial diversity essential for human health that began in about 1950 and has progressively worsened,” says Bosch, a Professor at Kiel University and Director of the interdisciplinary research centre, Kiel Life Science, in Germany.
“I got very interested in how architects and designers think about the loss of diversity in microbiomes and human disease, and their ideas about different ways in which architecture could contribute to the restoration or preservation of microbial diversity.”
As Wigley explains, the architecture of the 20th century – which is largely the architecture we still live in – is profoundly antibiotic in its approach. These sterile environments have contributed to negative health outcomes and the current health crisis in chronic diseases.
“The relationship between buildings and human biology is very intimate. As architects, we think of buildings as the way humans share microbes,” explains Wigley, Professor of Architecture and Dean Emeritus of the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York.
Those seminal conversations in Berlin about the relationships between modern buildings and the human microbiome sparked a multidisciplinary project, supported by CIFAR’s Catalyst Fund. It led to a perspective paper in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in April 2024.
This influential, collaborative paper proposes a new dimension of microbiome research and a radical shift in urban and building design that calls for a microbiome-friendly architecture, which seeks to improve human health by exposing – rather than shielding people – from contact with their microbial environment. It includes contributions from over 20 international researchers in CIFAR’s Humans & the Microbiome program and leading architectural researchers Wigley, Colomina and Forrest Meggers.
The paper argues that the depleted microbiome in buildings is a crucial environmental factor, which has accelerated the incidence of chronic diseases such as diabetes, asthma, heart disease, chronic bowel inflammation, multiple sclerosis, esophageal reflux, neurodermatitis, neurodegenerative diseases, food allergies and the rise of multiple cancers at younger ages.
“Humans are meta-organisms who have evolved with microbes as a functional unit over millions of years, and we know how important they are for human health,” says Bosch. “Our health and fitness as humans depend on being together with a rich, diverse group of beneficial microbes that colonize our tissues, our gut, our skin and oral cavity. When we remove or eliminate these microbes and make it hard for them to survive in hostile, anti-microbial built environments, humans get sick.”
Bosch and his colleagues see the contemporary built environment as a little-studied and underrecognized culprit, which increases our susceptibility to multiple illnesses by disrupting the normal, healthy evolutionary relationship between the body and bacteria.
“People in cities live and work mostly in enclosed indoor environments, which are very dry, with no outdoor ventilation, and intended to keep microbes out with materials such as anti-microbial treated ceilings and paints,” explains Bosch.
“But in our new thinking about the meta-organism, this ultra-hygienic architectural approach prevents human access to beneficial microbes and even worse, it accumulates, enriches and selects for microbes that we don’t want in these buildings. These are the real bad guys, multi-resistant bacteria,” he warns. “We need more permeability in architecture, which would allow for a greater exchange of beneficial microbes in buildings to support and maintain human health and fitness rather than enabling only harmful ones to survive and flourish.”
Future architecture should be designed for better health and constructed in such a way that a complex and diverse microbiome can survive and thrive, say the researchers.
“The manifesto we wrote together with the human microbiome scientists in the PNAS paper argues that we need to change the prevailing modern architectural strategy, which separates humans from the soil, plants and most other species,” explains Wigley.
Wigley suggests that a new era of building design should involve curating a more diverse array of microbes in the built environment, allowing for buildings to be open to the outside world and reconnect with plants, soil and other species. A useful model may be the human immune system, which doesn’t simply exclude enemy pathogens from the body, but incorporates specific mixtures of microbes to maintain a safe, healthy balance.
Bosch sees promising signs that certain cities are moving towards a probiotic architecture – a rewilding of building interiors and cityscapes. “Singapore, for example, which is nothing but an urban environment, is a green city. The design of this modern city goes in the direction of adding nature back, a rewilding where you have these green buildings with plants on roofs and plants everywhere, and open soil where kids can play,” he says, noting that cities in northern Europe, such as Oslo, are also getting rewilded. “When you go around Oslo, you find many areas with all kinds of wild plants and flowers, rather than sealed surfaces, like concrete.”
Since the PNAS article was published, Bosch and his collaborators have been invited to disseminate their ideas more broadly in publications such as The Microbiologist, and Cradle, a German architectural magazine. Wigley and Colomina also organized an architectural exhibition, called We the Bacteria: Towards Biotic Architecture, which opened in Milan in May 2025.
With the collaborations of more than 20 CIFAR researchers in the PNAS paper, this project has also helped to advance the work of the Human & the Microbiome program. Building on its original focus on the microbiome and the environment, these developments have spurred a broader movement within the program to understand the potential impact of the built microbiome on shaping the future of human health.
“Thomas is amazing at connecting people together, as he did by introducing us to his microbiome research colleagues at CIFAR,” says Wigley. “It was wonderful how this group who were from quite distinct subfields, often unrelated, could write a paper together which integrated so many different perspectives.”
Melissa Melby, a Fellow in the Humans & the Microbiome program and among the authors of the paper, brought her distinct perspective as a biological and medical anthropologist who has conducted more than 20 years of research in Japan.
“I’m particularly interested in Japanese architecture and how it integrates nature in a way that likely fosters more microbial exchange,” says Melby, a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. “This integrative interdisciplinary project allowed a lot of us as microbiome researchers to step back and ask questions that scientists had not really been considering before and envision new paths forward for how we can design and create healthier buildings and urban environments where people spend most of their time.”
As a result of this rich, interdisciplinary collaboration, the built-environment microbiome has been newly identified as an environmental factor with a huge impact and bearing on human health.
“A very modern class of architects and designers are now being trained to make urban planning and new building designs more in harmony with our thinking about making indoor environments more accessible and permeable to the outside with open windows and permeable building materials,” says Bosch. “I’m hopeful that the future generation of architects will think differently about how important these beneficial microbes are to human health.”
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