Neuroarchitecture in offices

The office is the most studied building type in neuroarchitecture, mostly because office work is easy to test: sit someone at a desk, change the air or the noise, and score a memory task. That makes the office evidence some of the strongest in the field. It also means much of it measures test scores in a lab rather than how a team works over a year.

Below is what holds up, in rough order of confidence. Each citation links to its record in the NEURODESIGN research corpus, with the study's limitations and two separate grades.

Air and ventilation

This is the best-supported office finding. In the Harvard COGfx study, 24 office workers scored higher on decision-making tests in a simulated office with more ventilation and fewer VOCs than under conventional conditions (Allen et al. 2016). A 2023 meta-analysis found short exposures to CO2 below 5,000 ppm were associated with cognitive effects, with complex tasks hit hardest (Fan et al. 2023). Broader reviews of indoor environmental quality and office work agree on the direction, while noting that effects vary by task (Wargocki & Wyon 2017, Wang et al. 2021).

A caution: CO2 in most of these studies stands in for ventilation as a whole. Raising the airflow changes many things at once, so the finding supports ventilating well, more than it supports any single CO2 number.

Temperature

A meta-analysis of 35 studies found no simple universal relationship between office temperature and performance (Porras-Salazar et al. 2021). A later meta-analysis found that temperatures above about 25 °C tended to worsen accuracy or response time, especially over long exposures (Lin et al. 2025). Then a 2026 experiment with 75 adults at four temperatures from 21 to 27 °C found no significant difference in test performance, even though 64% wanted cooler air at 27 °C and heart rate variability fell (Kramer & Schiavon 2026).

Read together, warm rooms make people uncomfortable and physiologically strained well before test scores move. Comfort is a legitimate design goal on its own, and individual control over temperature is the practical answer to the spread in what people want.

Speech noise

The problem is speech you can understand. Performance drops become more likely as background speech becomes more intelligible, and verbal short-term memory suffers most (Haapakangas et al. 2020). Even quiet sound can disrupt serial recall when it is not subjectively loud (C. P. Beaman 2005). In office-like lab settings, irrelevant speech degraded task performance (Kostallari et al. 2020), and higher open-plan noise impaired word memory and left people more tired (Jahncke et al. 2011).

For design, this points at speech privacy (absorption, distance, screening and masking) rather than at decibel limits alone.

The open-plan question

Two systematic reviews sixteen years apart found open-plan offices more often linked with lower satisfaction and worse health and productivity measures, with noise and privacy as the recurring reasons (de Croon et al. 2005, James et al. 2021). A large occupant survey found the communication benefits did not make up for the loss of privacy (Kim & de Dear 2013), and an earlier review linked density to lower environmental satisfaction (Duval et al. 2002).

Two cautions. Some of the contradictions in this literature come down to which outcomes researchers chose to measure (Bennis et al. 2022). And layout does change behavior in ways that may be wanted: more visibility was linked to shorter sitting bouts, and proximity to more face-to-face contact (Sugiyama et al. 2021). Activity-based offices help with some productivity factors, but focus work and matching tasks to spaces remain the weak points (Masoudinejad & Veitch 2023).

Daylight, views and plants

Across 55 studies, indoor climate, privacy and naturalness had the strongest links to wellbeing and satisfaction, while links to cognitive scores were less consistent (Zhang et al. 2023). Office workers with more window and daylight exposure slept longer in one small study (Boubekri et al. 2014). Views of nature and indoor plants were associated with lower tension in a simulated office (Chang & Chen 2005), and a VR workplace with plants, natural sound and scent improved stress and mood measures (Yildirim et al. 2024). These studies are small and the interventions bundled, so treat them as encouraging rather than settled.

Scent and lighting color: early and mixed

A 2026 study of 14 adults in two identical offices found jasmine scent made the room more pleasant to work in, but EEG and other body measures showed no robust differences (Mohsen Kafaei et al. 2026). Another 2026 experiment varied temperature, noise and lighting color together and found higher skin conductance at 25 °C than at 20 °C, though the interaction findings rest on a small sample (Mirmahdi Seyedrezaei et al. 2026).

Questions about office neuroarchitecture

Does office design affect productivity?
Some parts of it clearly do. Ventilation, temperature and intelligible background speech have measurable effects on cognitive test scores in controlled studies. Effects on real-world productivity are harder to measure and depend heavily on the task and the organization.
Are open-plan offices bad for you?
Systematic reviews from 2005 and 2021 both found open-plan offices were more often linked with lower satisfaction and worse health and productivity measures than enclosed offices. Noise and lack of privacy were the recurring reasons. The studies are mostly observational, so office culture and management may explain part of the difference.
What is the best office temperature for thinking?
There is no single number. One meta-analysis found performance tended to drop above about 25 °C, but a 2026 experiment with 75 adults found no significant difference between 21 and 27 °C on cognitive tests, even though most people wanted cooler air at 27 °C. Giving people control is safer than chasing a target.

More neuroarchitecture guides

Sources cited on this page

  1. Wang et al. (2021). How indoor environmental quality affects occupants' cognitive functions: A systematic review. Building and Environment · High · Direct built environment
  2. Fan et al. (2023). Short-term exposure to indoor carbon dioxide and cognitive task performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Building and Environment · High · Direct built environment
  3. Allen et al. (2016). Associations of Cognitive Function Scores with Carbon Dioxide, Ventilation, and Volatile Organic Compound Exposures in Office Workers. Environmental Health Perspectives · Moderate-high · Direct built environment
  4. Wargocki & Wyon (2017). Ten questions concerning thermal and indoor air quality effects on the performance of office work and schoolwork. Building and Environment · High · Direct built environment
  5. Porras-Salazar et al. (2021). Meta-analysis of 35 studies examining the effect of indoor temperature on office work performance. Building and Environment · High · Direct built environment
  6. Lin et al. (2025). The effects of temperature on work performance in the typical office environment: A meta-analysis of current evidence. Building and Environment · High · Direct built environment
  7. Jahncke et al. (2011). Open-plan office noise: Cognitive performance and restoration. Journal of Environmental Psychology · Moderate-high · Direct built environment
  8. C. P. Beaman (2005). Auditory distraction from low-intensity noise: a review of the consequences for learning and workplace environments. Applied Cognitive Psychology · High · Adjacent human mechanism
  9. Haapakangas et al. (2020). The relation between intelligibility of irrelevant speech and cognitive performance: a revised model. Indoor Air · High · Direct built environment
  10. Kostallari et al. (2020). Irrelevant speech effect in open-plan offices: A laboratory study. Applied Acoustics · Moderate · Direct built environment
  11. Boubekri et al. (2014). Impact of Windows and Daylight Exposure on Overall Health and Sleep Quality of Office Workers. Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine · Moderate · Direct built environment
  12. James, Delfabbro & King (2021). A Comparison of Psychological and Work Outcomes in Open-Plan and Cellular Office Designs: A Systematic Review. SAGE Open · High · Direct built environment
  13. de Croon et al. (2005). The effect of office concepts on worker health and performance: a systematic review of the literature. Ergonomics / Occupational literature · High · Direct built environment
  14. Kim & de Dear (2013). Workspace satisfaction: The privacy-communication trade-off in open-plan offices. Journal of Environmental Psychology · Moderate-high · Direct built environment
  15. Zhang, Du & Chow (2023). Association between perceived indoor environmental characteristics and occupants' mental well-being, cognitive performance, productivity, satisfaction in workplaces. Building and Environment · High · Direct built environment
  16. Sugiyama et al. (2021). Office spatial design attributes, sitting, and face-to-face interactions: Systematic review and research agenda. Building and Environment · High · Direct built environment
  17. Yildirim, Globa, Gocer & Brambilla (2024). Multisensory nature exposure in the workplace: Exploring the restorative benefits of smell experiences. Building and Environment · Moderate · Direct built environment
  18. Chang & Chen (2005). Human Response to Window Views and Indoor Plants in the Workplace. HortScience · Moderate · Direct built environment
  19. Duval, Charles & Veitch (2002). Open-plan office density and environmental satisfaction. National Research Council Canada · Moderate-high · Direct built environment
  20. Bennis et al. (2022). Methodological considerations in the open-plan office paradox. Work · High · Direct built environment
  21. Masoudinejad & Veitch (2023). The effects of activity-based workplaces on contributors to organizational productivity: A systematic review. Journal of Environmental Psychology · High · Direct built environment
  22. Mirmahdi Seyedrezaei, Burcin Becerik-Gerber, Mohamad Awada, Gale Lucas, Shawn C. Roll (2026). Interaction effects of indoor environmental quality on stress among young adults: An experimental study. Indoor and Built Environment · Emerging · Direct built environment
  23. Tobias Kramer, Stefano Schiavon (2026). Indoor temperature and office work performance in a temperate climate. Buildings & Cities, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1162-1180 · Moderate · Direct built environment
  24. Mohsen Kafaei, Jane Burry, Mehrnoush Latifi, Joseph Ciorciari, Amirhossein Aminitabar, Nan Gao (2026). Olfactory Environmental Quality in Office Environments: A Neuroarchitecture Study of Multimodal Responses to Contrasting Hedonic Ambient Odors. Indoor Air, vol. 2026, article 7968077 · Emerging · Direct built environment

Written by Kesi Shankar, founder of NEURODESIGN. Corpus last updated 2026-11-03. To suggest a study or flag an error, use the contact page.