Skin-to-Skin Architecture is about rethinking how we design cities and buildings, not just as objects we use, but as spaces that touch us back. Inspired by the power of skin-to-skin contact in neonatal care, where a caregiver’s touch stabilizes, calms, and connects, we ask: what if our built environment could do the same?

In Skin-to-Skin, we explore how humans experience architecture not just with their eyes, but with their whole bodies, skin and beyond. The feeling of warm bricks, the echo of footsteps, these sensory stimuli shape how we feel, move, and belong. Cities aren’t just maps and buildings, they become part of us. Through real-life examples, like the resilient refugee camp of Zaatari or the bomb-scarred city of Kharkiv, we see how spaces can hold memory, care, and even healing.

Modern urban design often leaves us disconnected, built for efficiency instead of emotion. We argue for something more human, more connected, an architecture that responds, protects, and even comforts, like skin. Cities, like people, have a body and a soul. And maybe the best cities are the ones that, in their own way, hold us close. Not just places to live, but places that make us alive.

The Power of Skin-to-Skin

In neonatal care, skin-to-skin contact is one of the most profound forms of biological and emotional bonding. Newborns placed directly on their mother’s or caregiver’s chest experience immediate physiological benefits. Their heart rate stabilizes, their stress hormones decrease, and their bodies begin to regulate temperature and breathing in sync with the caregiver (Luong et al., 2015; Atalay et al., 2018). But this is not just about survival; it’s about attachment, security, and early cognitive development. An unspoken and mostly subconscious bond, plugged into an unknown network, a deep connection. As Ashley Montagu described in Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, touch is the first sense to develop in the womb and remains one of the most crucial throughout life. The World Health Organization strongly recommends skin-to-skin contact for newborns because it helps their health and supports their growth in a safe, loving environment (Widström et al., 2019; Tran et al., 2021).

Studies on Kangaroo Care (skin-to-skin contact for premature infants) show that babies who experience regular touch develop greater resilience to stress, better sleep-wake cycles, and enhanced emotional regulation (Feldman et al., 2002). More than that, they also show long-term cognitive benefits, with improved social engagement and a stronger sense of self. The evolutionary significance of this is enormous: in early human societies, infants who stayed close to their caregivers were protected from predators, kept warm, and nourished not only physically but emotionally. Touch became a primal form of communication, one that signals safety, trust, and belonging. Furthermore, this practice does not only benefit the infant but also reduces maternal (and paternal) stress, leading to improved psychological well-being for everyone involved (Mörelius & Anderson, 2015).

Now, what if this deeply ingrained need for connection extends beyond just human relationships? What if our built environment could also provide a form of “skin-to-skin” contact, fostering a similar sense of security, warmth, and presence, a deeply ingrained societal resilience? Natural materials have similar health benefits to being out in nature (Benessaiah & Chan, 2023; Capaldi et al., 2015). Interior spaces should foster psychological well-being and aid a healthy lifestyle, being safe spaces which enable us to feel comfortable, relaxed and revived as we live within them.

Where the Body Stops

Our perception of our body is not confined to the skin, it extends just beyond it. The brain’s somatosensory system does not end at the epidermis; rather, it includes a perceptual field just outside the body, known as peripersonal space (Miller et al., 2019). This is why we flinch before something touches us, why we feel an eerie closeness when someone stands just a bit too near, and why tools become extensions of ourselves. Wooden surfaces help to ‘bring nature indoors’, making a room feel warmer and cosier, and they also have a calming effect, comparable to the feeling of walking in the forest; the weight is lifted from our shoulders and we feel revived, renewed and refreshed, nature has a positive effect on us that is second to none. ‘Natural elements in the built environment help people recover from stress and mental fatigue and generally lift their mood’ (Libby Burton, professor of Sustainable Building Design and Wellbeing, University of Warwick).

As Michael Graziano’s research on body mapping has shown, our brains constantly adjust our sense of self to include the objects we interact with. A skilled violinist feels the bow as part of their own body, just as a carpenter integrates a hammer into their proprioceptive awareness (Graziano, 1999). Now, consider this on the scale of a city. As Kevin Lynch described in The Image of the City, we navigate urban environments not just through logic but through an embodied, sensory-based mental map, a felt experience rather than just a spatial one (Lynch, 1960).

This means that the city is not just something we live in, it becomes part of us. The well-worn steps of a favourite café, the familiar press of a subway turnstile, the temperature shift between shaded alleyways and sunlit plazas, all of these enter our cognitive schema of self. The city, in this sense, is an extension of the human body.

Generations of Cities

The current urban ‘skin’ is made of concrete, steel, and asphalt, which is what defines most cities today. This is largely a remnant of the industrial city, a product of industrialisation, mass production, and rigid infrastructural planning. Cities were designed for efficiency, not for human experience. The first-generation city was organic, shaped by nature, community, and necessity. The placement of the city and the design thereof were determined by rivers, mountains, fertile fields. The second-generation city, the industrial metropolis prioritized scale, roads, and production, often at the expense of sensory and social intimacy.

Now, as we transition into the third-generation city, we stand at a crossroads. What should the urban fabric of the future look like? Do we continue to patch and extend the industrial city’s legacy, with its hard surfaces and segregated zones, or do we redesign or rediscover an urban skin that is softer, more adaptive, and more responsive to human needs? The challenge lies in reconnecting cities to the body, moving beyond the legacy of the machine age toward spaces that are breathable, tactile, and nourishing.

Climate change, digital urbanism, and increasing social fragmentation demand a radical rethinking of urban design: one that acknowledges cities not just as infrastructures, but as living, evolving ecosystems. The next city, if designed well, will have a different kind of skin, one that touches back rather than alienates.

The Skin of the City

Modern cities are often perceived as impersonal, mechanical, and disconnected from the human body, not because they lack form, but because they fail to engage the full spectrum of human perception. We don’t simply experience a place through sight; we assemble reality through a convergence of senses. The texture of a rough brick wall, the muffled hum of footsteps on stone, the way warm air swirls around a sunlit plaza, or the scent of rain hitting pavement, these layers of sensory input come together to create meaning.

As Juhani Pallasmaa wrote in The Eyes of the Skin, modern architecture has privileged the visual at the expense of the other senses, flattening urban experience into something to be seen rather than felt. But cities are more than optical landscapes; they are spaces of resonance, where memory and emotion are shaped through multisensory interactions. The porousness of buildings allows not just light and air to move through, but also sound, scent, and temperature, shaping an environment that can be either inviting or alienating. The acoustics of a lively market, the echo of a narrow alley, the way familiar materials like aged wood or weathered stone hold warmth, these elements weave together a spatial experience that is both intuitive and embodied (Pallasmaa, 2005).

Jan Gehl, in Cities for People, emphasizes that well-designed cities operate at a human scale, engaging the senses in a way that encourages presence rather than mere movement. The best urban spaces don’t just guide, they invite. A textured railing that naturally fits the curve of a hand, the scent of blooming jasmine marking the entrance to a hidden courtyard, the subtle shift in temperature between open squares and shaded corridors—these details ground us in place. When cities rely solely on visual aesthetics and neglect touch, sound, and even smell, they become sterile landscapes, disconnected from the biological and subconscious bonds that make spaces feel alive, intuitive, and deeply human (Gehl, 2010).

The Urban Collective Subconscious

Just as skin-to-skin fosters attachment and trust, cities have a subconscious collective of local knowledge. People do not simply navigate cities rationally; they feel their way through them, they are a part of them, they are the city.

Christopher Alexander, in A Pattern Language, described how certain architectural and urban forms naturally generate comfort and belonging, courtyards that feel enclosed yet open, paths that gently curve to invite exploration, doorways that create an intuitive sense of passage. These spaces shape the shared body of a city, embedding haptic memory into the urban fabric (Alexander et al., 1977).
Think of the desired paths (common analogy in UX), the footprints of human intuition, where people carve their own routes against rigid planning, where the experiences of the human overwrite the designed intent. Places are imprinted with the energy of communal experience, markets, plazas, courtyards, where people brush past each other, engaging in an unspoken sensory dialogue.

A city that lacks skin-to-skin architecture loses its shared body. It becomes a city of isolation, where spaces are surfaces rather than extensions of the human form. Eventually, questioning if the humans using these spaces, and cohabitating, are actually part of the same herd or not… without this subconscious layer, without this unspoken bond, we are a hostile tribe, against the others, and all of a sudden, the city becomes a place of competition and survival, rather than co-creation and social unity.

As Edward Hall wrote in The Hidden Dimension, human relationships to space are not universal, they are shaped by culture, experience, and sensory perception. The more a city recognizes how bodies move, feel, and connect, the more it fosters a collective sense of belonging.

Zaatari

The UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) refugee camp Zaatari in Jordan was founded in 2012 and is inhabited by more than 80.000 Syrian refugees. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) driven Maternity and Child Health (MCH) Polyclinic is operated by Jordan Health Aid Society, with more than 1000 children born annually. The existing UNFPA healthcare construction doesn’t meet the UN’s own Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The lightweight metal-polyurethane-plastic sandwich elements must be replaced every three years, resulting in piles of unrecyclable humanitarian waste, as with the rest of the UN camps. There is no skin. But at the same time, the UNFPA Zaatari MCH Polyclinic is a genius humanitarian machine. The functional circulation between gynaecologists, family planning, laboratories, pharmacy, prenatal care, delivery, post-natal care, child health monitoring, and more has been cooked to perfection during the 12 years of operation. Not a single mother has died during the delivery.

UNFPA Zaatari MCH Polyclinic is a women’s territory; men are not allowed to enter. It is also a shelter for gender-based violence victims and a psychologically calming and safe space for the women and girls to breathe, to think, to plan for family and future away from the patriarchal pressure. According to UNFPA, the Zaatari MCH Polyclinic is its most successful operation among the more than 500 refugee camps around the world.

UNFPA Zaatari MCH Polyclinic is in a process of transformation. It is generating a skin. It is opening its eyes and looking at its children. The unsustainable lightweight sandwich elements will be replaced by modular, modifiable, and movable engineered massive wooden structures, which will meet the UN SDGs. And more than that, they will bring a skin to the maternity hospital and turn it into an organic machine, a tectonic organism capable of communicative interaction, empathy, and healing. A healing space with a scent of forest, soft acoustics, and soft, warm skin.

The Zaatari MCH Polyclinic Skin-to-Skin architecture is developed in cooperation with one of UNFPA’s leading midwives, Maria Hogenäs from Sweden. She sees the art of life and birth as peace work. The Zaatari Skin-to-Skin maternity and child-health polyclinic is aiming for psychologically calming and regenerative architecture, empowering and looking into the eyes of refugee women and girls, projecting a high level of care and safety. It is a massive wooden organic machine, like a forest or a river is a machine. Wood has both physiological and psychological well-being effects on us – calming, relaxing, pleasant, and desirable. Wood in healthcare settings has restorative properties, resulting in improved patient recovery. These benefits are particularly important for environments where it is difficult to incorporate nature indoors, such as hospitals, where strict health and safety guidelines may prevent the presence of plants.

The biological architecture reflects the biological architecture of human body; the mediator is the skin. When we improve our sense of nature, directly or indirectly, we will benefit from the psychological and physical well-being effects that a more calming, restful, restorative and energising space creates. The natural wooden healing space supports the children’s bond to their mothers as multiple senses interact through the natural surroundings.

Massive wooden Skin-to-Skin Architecture increases people’s social interaction and harmonic emotional relationships with each other. The use of wood has clear physiological and psychological benefits that mimic the effect of spending time outside in nature. The feelings of natural warmth and comfort that wood elicits in people have the effect of lowering blood pressure and heart rate, reducing stress and anxiety, and increasing positive social interactions. The wooden skin decreases negative emotions, negative pattern thinking, anxiety and depression.

Urban Scars

Kharkiv, the second largest city of Ukraine, is situated some 40 km from the frontline of East Ukraine. The city with a million civil inhabitants gets randomly bombed on a daily basis. Children go to school underground in metro stations. The scars of war are visible in most of the buildings. Nevertheless, the urban shared space has become warm, open and common. The city is breathing, and people with it, and the urbanism feels biological. The more the industrial-military destruction is trying to break up the human control of the collective city, the more active the citizens have become to patch up their windows and to clear up the broken parts of the buildings from the streets, as if they care more, or as if their care was woken up, even if violently. Human softness and pliancy are expressions of life and growth, whereas hardness and control and companions of death. The cities built by industrial control are anti-acupuncture needles on the larger biology, and we feel the traumas of pollution, but still keep going on, grinding off the organic.

Now in Kharkiv, this hard-core urban industrial cycle is suddenly violently stopped, broken up, and changed. Paid with blood, with broken dreams, and with broken infrastructure. Cracks on the asphalt and broken slabs of concrete are growing weeds and flowers – keeping the city alive, and keeping it ruined. Now the ruin process is accelerated, the human control is opened up in order for nature to step in, including human nature. Kharkiv has become an organic public sphere, a city of cracks.

Stone-eyed small children are full of resilience. Shining black diamonds. They are the gravity-points of love embraced by mother, competing siblings, possible war-father – but absent anyway, grandmother, and the surrounding fluid community of humanity. Children still remember how to kiss a ladybug in the shadows of the ruined Saltivka apartment buildings. Saltivka is a ruin and home to some 400.000 inhabitants. Plenty of pain and plenty of humanity. Left without electricity, the individual apartments have their cold storage dug underground in front of the apartment buildings into the fertile ground of the Ukrainian chornozem (black soil). They look like an underground city with doors to the skin of the earth. These cold wells go several meters underground and are full of food from the surrounding farmers.

Teenagers are suffering. They are pale, skinny and with black rings under the eyes. One can feel the nervousness, constant alertness for the sounds of the Shaheds – will they start circulating, or will they just continue away? If they circulate, you must take cover. Constant sound of the air alert signal in the city and on your mobile phone. Most have unloaded the APP. Bombs hitting the city in ‘distance’, which now may be 200 meters. Nobody can stay underground for 3 years, and more are coming. Is there any future, a teenager must think. Also, the school system is fighting. One must continue school one way or another; the country cannot afford to lose a generation. One must fight for education. Three years of terror is not good for a teenager who wants to explore things. The teenagers look like scars. They are the skin of a suffering city.

Blown-out windows are replaced with chipboards. The centralized urban infrastructure has been destroyed. The running of the city is decentralized, back in the hands of the citizens. Grannies are grinding coffee, farmers are grinding the fields and seeds into flour, teenagers are grinding chewing gum, and war is grinding the city.

With its scars, the city feels very much alive. The facades, parks, and streets are parts of the collective urban skin. When a bomb hits a street, it won’t take long until the street is clean, and the windows are patched. Not one piece of broken brick in the urban space. Everyone takes part in taking care of the city’s skin. This is, after all, how the city would feel them – with its skin. The citizens communicate with the collective consciousness through this skin. The connection with the communicative urban skin increases positive emotions, creativity and productivity, is good for mental and spiritual health and reduces physiological stress and facilitates the recovery of physiological stress.

Kharkiv is breathing and it is alive. The battle scars are reflections of resilience – collective resilience of a city. People are not celebrating these damages on the urban skin. Mostly, they are not paying attention to them at all. It is what it is. But they feel them. And it feels as if the city would feel its citizens too, because of its skin, and because of the scars in its skin. The ruthless machine of war has evoked high sensitivity in the city, which it could not break. The eyes of Kharkiv in its skin are everywhere. With industrialism, these eyes are closed. Now the citizens are looking at their mother city eye to eye, skin-to-skin.

Conclusion: Beyond Surfaces, Toward Connection

Skin-to-skin is not just about touch; it is about trust, belonging, and the silent knowledge that something will hold you. Cities and buildings should not be passive backdrops but active participants in our well-being, just as a parent’s skin nurtures an infant. The body extends into the city, and the city into the body. We are tapping into the subconscious of the city. An unspoken bond where we have become a part of the city. This is where the collective intelligence is; this is where local knowledge resides. This is the layer we should design for.

Architecture is not just about form, nor function, it is about relationship. Perhaps, the most powerful cities are the ones that whisper back when we touch them.

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