Trey Farmer is an architect and sustainability practitioner exploring how the places we inhabit shape our health, behaviour and relationship with the natural world.We tend to think of buildings as things we put up around ourselves: walls, windows, doors, roofs. But what if we thought of it instead as something that we live in and with?In this episode, Jack speaks with Trey about Passive House certification (Passivhaus), healthy buildings and the often-overlooked relationship between our physical environments and our wellbeing. Along the way, we get into indoor air quality, natural light, materials, energy efficiency and the surprising ways that the places we spend our time can influence how we feel and function.We also talk about the idea of the palimpsest: a building as something written, rewritten and layered over time. Good architecture doesn't necessarily erase what came before it; it can allow old stories, materials and meanings to remain visible while giving a place a new life. There's something rather poetic in that idea — and perhaps something useful for how we think about our own lives, too.More from TreyE: trey@forgexcraft.comIG: https://www.instagram.com/forgexcraft/IG: https://www.instagram.com/forgecrafthealthyhomies/Trey also introduces Jack/us to some new terminology:Energy wonk — someone who is deeply interested in the technical, economic and political details of how energy is produced, used and managed.Energy arbitrage — taking advantage of differences in energy prices or availability, such as using or storing energy when it is cheaper and shifting consumption to another time.VOCs — volatile organic compounds: chemicals released as gases by many household products and building materials, some of which can affect indoor air quality.To grok — to understand something deeply and intuitively, rather than merely knowing the facts about it.Also: The Myth of the Average PilotIn the early 1950s, Lt. Gilbert Daniels analysed data from 4,063 pilots – not 3,000 as Jack alluded to – looking at ten physical dimensions relevant to cockpit design. Not one pilot fell within the defined “average” range across all ten dimensions — a useful reminder of what happens when we design systems around an imaginary average rather than real individuals.Keep exploring Fitness & ThinkingIf this conversation got you thinking about the relationship between people and the environments around them, there are a couple of places to go next:Güs | Sauna, Cold Exposure & The Truth About Wellness | F&T47Chris Jones and Rob Hemingway of Güs join Jack to talk about sauna, cold exposure, resilience, eustress and what we actually mean when we talk about “wellness”. A different kind of environment, but a similarly interesting question: how do the spaces and experiences we deliberately put ourselves into affect how we feel?Logan Collignon | What If The Rocket Has Already Landed? | F&T18A conversation about Freud, cyborgs, the post-human and the idea of the holobiont — the notion that we aren't really self-contained individuals at all, but porous systems shaped by our relationships with other people, organisms and environments. If Trey's argument is that our buildings become part of our wellbeing, Logan takes that idea somewhere considerably stranger.Fitness & ThinkingF&T explores the physical, mental, social, spiritual, emotional and financial sides of what it means to live well — and the strange territory between achieving what you thought you wanted and figuring out what comes next.New episodes every week. Like and subscribe to never miss a beat!
