Today it is my pleasure to talk with Raymond Richard Neutra, an epidemiologist who served as the Chief of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Diseases at the California Department of Health. Before this long term of public service, he was a professor at UCLA and Harvard Medical School and was founding president of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. Raymond carries on his family’s legacy as the founder and president of the LA based Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design. 

We discussed enriched environments, forming good habits through building habitats that support them and good design as a matter of public health. We mutually wondered whether or not neuroscience is necessary to architectural design or is environmental psychology enough? We talked about the necessity and richness of thick descriptions, body to body non-verbal communication, the 72 seasons in Japan, how eating is a social event, kinetic memories and much more . . .