Hospitality Design - November 2017 - 130

changemakers

the philosopher

Tye Farrow
Farrow Partners
Tye Farrow thought he might thrive in
advertising. At a young age, he ran a successful
business, dreaming up marketing plans for
prominent local businesses in the community
west of Toronto where he was raised. Then,
buoyed by vivid memories of the building
models fashioned by his architect father, a
partner at Dunlop Farrow, one of Canada's
largest architectural firms, he abandoned the
"temporal advertising zone" for the intricate,
enduring realm of architecture. "It had a fuller
basket of challenges to tackle-engineering,
complex systems, budgets, and regulatory
approvals paired with how the environment
(where one lives, works, rests, learns, and
heals) could make you feel better," he recalls.
Such a holistic ethos was fostered by
Farrow's mentor at the University of Toronto,
the late German-Canadian architect Eberhard
Zeidler, whose diverse projects spanned
the Toronto retail behemoth Eaton Centre,
Walter C. Mackenzie Health Sciences Centre

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in Edmonton, Alberta, and San Francisco's
Yerba Buena Gardens. "What I admired about
his work was the singular underpinning
of humanism; how one's human emotions
respond to the environment around us, or as
he called it, 'understanding what we can only
feel,'" says Farrow, who helped open Zeidler's
London office before pursuing his master's
of architecture in urban design at Harvard
University and starting Farrow Partners in
Toronto in 2004.
Now a visionary in his own right, Farrow
launched the Cause Health movement in
2012, which creates "places where we thrive,
through a process of co-creation, in order to
expand possibilities." Farrow's aim is to raise
the standards of global design, ultimately
achieving total health in built environments
by asking: Does this place cause health? How
does it make me feel?
These questions, he says, transcend
traditional concerns and expand the meaning
of design excellence beyond aesthetics to
include the impact on human health. "We
can no longer afford to tolerate places that fail
to ensure we thrive," he says. "Generations
of constructing environments that deny our
deeply rooted biological needs have yielded not
only a surge of lifestyle-related diseases, but
also a plague on the human spirit." For Farrow,
design today can't be "isolated, placeless,
careless, and rootless. Every element in every
space serves to either enhance or erode our
capacity to thrive."
One way of expanding the presence of
feel-good structures is by considering the
human and natural environmental health
needs that have long been overlooked
in favor of physical wellbeing. For
example, Farrow subscribes to
Israeli-American medical sociologist
Aaron Antonovsky's concept of
salutogenesis, which reframes

health as a positive force more than the
negative term pathogenic, which solely
connotes disease. "The Cause Health view
is focused on leveraging human assets and
capabilities and engages us in building on
these strengths to optimize health," he says.
Propelled by recent research in neurogenesis
that shows how the adult brain can forge new
neural networks amid enriched conditions-
proving that memory can be impacted or
created by surroundings-and nature-driven
biophilic design, his firm developed five Vital
Signs deemed crucial to total health: nature,
authenticity, variety, vitality, and legacy.
This quintet of thought-provoking needs
steers Farrow's past and future projects.
Take the new Carlo Fidani Peel Regional
Cancer Centre at Credit Valley Hospital
in Mississauga, Ontario. A building of
this kind, says Farrow, is one of the most
complex to design, "from the technological
and radiation shielding requirements to the
human, emotional side of the equation."
The patients wanted a design that gave
them hope and felt alive, so every aspect of
the experience "makes all that are using
the center feel better," he says. This begins
at the entrance, where "soaring tree-like
shapes create feelings of both protection
and inspiration. Similar to a walk in the
forest, there are places of canopied refuge,
as well as open spaces that encourage visual

A rendering of the planned butterflyshaped, 70,000-square-foot Shaare Zedek
Cancer Centre in Jerusalem
Hospitality Design - November 2017

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