New Building Designs
Help People to Fight Flab

In July 2007, when students of Virginia Commonwealth University attend classes in a redesigned business-school building, they'll face a new hurdle: a staircase.

Most of the 3,000 students now at the Richmond, Va., business school take elevators to reach classrooms. But in the new structure, the elevators will be especially slow-moving. They will also be tucked away at the rear, while the atrium will feature a prominent set of stairs -- 28 to get to the second floor, and a total of 76 to get all the way up to the fourth floor.

A key reason for the new design: keeping faculty and students fit.

'Slimming mirror' can hearten stair climbers.

Buildings have long been designed so people can get from one place to another with minimum physical effort. Now, in a bid to fight a rising tide of obesity, companies, universities and other institutions are embracing the opposite idea: buildings that force employees to move around a lot more.

At the California Department of Transportation's new district headquarters in Los Angeles, elevators stop on every third floor -- an inducement for those who can to use the stairs. (There's a separate elevator for the disabled.) Phone giant Sprint Nextel Corp.'s corporate campus in Overland Park, Kan., has pathways and a covered arcade, to encourage employees to walk even in inclement weather.

Health-related design has growing appeal for some of the biggest users of real estate -- companies that rent office space. When architects were designing a lab for Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis AG in San Diego, they had the option to build an enclosed corridor linking the five buildings. Instead, they constructed an outdoor, shaded walkway. Not only has this provided more indoor space for the labs, but the idea of a walk outside on a nice day (almost every day in San Diego) encourages employees to meet and spontaneously interact -- an outcome that scientific-research firms and universities are keen to promote.

To see if he could persuade people to use stairs instead of elevators, Luuk Engbers, a human-movement scientist at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, last year began a 12-month experiment in a seven-story office building in The Hague. At the entrance, he printed footprints on the floor that led toward the staircase. Stickers on the elevator cheekily asked would-be passengers how long they had been waiting -- and exhorted them to walk up and lose some calories instead. The staircase itself was lined with health-related posters and special mirrors that made people look slim. "We wanted to make them look better than they do in an elevator mirror," explains Mr. Engbers.

Employees at a similar building nearby were studied as a control group. The result: People in the first building took the stairs twice as much, and covered more floors with each use, than those in the control building.

This trellis-like walkway at Novartis Research Foundation in La Jolla, Calif., encourages walking between buildings.

Walking up the stairs to their office may be all the exercise many employees ever get. Leisure-time physical activity in the U.S. increased in the late 1990s but then remained at the same level before dropping in 2004. The percentage of American adults who engaged in regular leisure-time physical activity fell to 30.2% in 2004 from 32.8% the previous year, according to the CDC survey.

About five years ago, researchers in England and Northern Ireland asked 12 sedentary women to climb a 199-step staircase, progressing from once a day for the first five weeks to six times a day in week six and seven. Their heart rate, oxygen intake and cholesterol levels were measured. A control group, whose members didn't climb stairs, was similarly monitored, according to the study, published in 2000 in the journal Preventive Medicine. In about two months, the stair climbers saw a boost in their fitness level, along with significant improvements in their cholesterol level.

Barbara Hansen, a 51-year-old technical writer working at Sprint Nextel's Overland Park corporate campus, weighed 256 pounds in March 2004. Her job requires her to sit for hours at a time in front of a computer. But today, Ms. Hansen weighs 196 pounds -- 60 pounds lighter. Her blood pressure has returned to a normal level, and she no longer takes Crestor, a cholesterol-reducing drug.

Ms. Hansen attributes her weight reduction to healthier eating, regular visits to a fitness center and plenty of walking -- thanks to the design of Sprint's large campus. Employees are encouraged to bike or jog during their lunch hour; the stairwells are brightly lit and hung with paintings; the elevators are a little slower than usual. Ms. Hansen says she now climbs the stairs everyday to her office, five floors up.

When designing a new building, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a health philanthropy, incorporated a "walking trail" around its campus in Princeton, N.J. The steps on the main staircase are wider than a typical step and have lower risers, making them easier to climb. The cafeteria and key meeting rooms are located on the perimeter of the new building.

The employees' "initial reaction was, 'Wow, I've got to go a long way to get to a meeting,' " says Peter Goodwin, a vice president at the foundation. "But that has waned. They now enjoy the opportunity to walk. As a worst case, they accept it."

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