Welcome to CET’s fact-filled website!
Feel free to browse through our themes:
The Built Environment and its Relationship to Environmental Therapeutics
Across the world, daylight is available all year round in sufficient intensity, color composition and spectral distribution to support our health and wellbeing. To be precise, across the year we all have 4,380 hours daylight, no matter where we are situated in the world. Not surprisingly though, these 4.380 hours are quite unevenly distributed during the year, depending of the latitude. Thus, the day-night cycle and the summer-winter cycle is a fundamental part of our life, with several documented health effects. Studies have shown that outdoor activities in daylight, such as morning walks, together with light therapy, provide significant benefit for people suffering from depression. Likewise, outdoor fresh air is available all year round and has positive effects on sleep and general activity and wellbeing.
However, in the western world we spend more than 90% of the time indoors, occupying the built environment and architectural environments with little planning for circadian daylight, improperly designed. We often receive too little or too low intensities of light as well as insufficient fresh air to sustain a healthy daily cycle. Although both daylight and fresh air are free and abundantly available to support our mood, energy, and sleep, we are not making the most of it when it comes to architectural planning that can support our daily behavior in the built environment.
Find out more in CET’s collection of original articles and other information:
Healing Architecture by Anna Wirz-Justice, PhD
Can We Develop a Solar-Based Architecture? by Carlo Volf, PhD
How We Keep Our Circadian Rhythms from Drifting by Klaus Martiny, PhD
Environment Films
Circadian Environment Literature
Interview with Leaders: Manuel Spitschan, PhD, Katharina Wulff, PhD, Lisa Heschong
