The busyness of modern life often makes us overlook that we, too, are part of the natural world. Though the National Park Service “sets aside certain places to preserve and protect,” mature engineer-y types know that even dams and urban plazas are basically geological constructions; power plants and massive highway interchanges are mighty, up-to-date technologies of the buffalo hunt.
So, what is biophilic design all about? Biophilic design is a fresh way of doing things, a method that is likely to gain a lot of attention in the coming years. It is going to permeate a lot of different aspects of life, from architecture to interior design, so I had better make sure that I get this right. But some topics turn out to be complicated. Are you supposed to understand every single thing you read the first time you read it? Probably not.
The idea of biophilic design is to weave elements of nature into our constructed spaces. Biologist E.O. Wilson is largely responsible for our current understanding of the concept. He proposed that humans are inherently drawn to the kinds of landscapes where our species first evolved. Now, some leading-edge designers are translating this work into creating real spaces meant for people to live and work in. They are mixing forms and materials found in the natural world with “artificial” stuff in ways that just feel right, making spaces that serve people’s well-being and that connect us to our evolutionary home.
Picture yourself entering an office building. It doesn’t feel like you’re walking into a business so much as it does that you’re sauntering into some sort of romantic, 19th-century urban greenhouse. The lichgate alone is enough to knock you across the noggin with Biophilia. That’s the kind of eventuality Eugiene Tsui had long envisioned when he was an architecture student at the University of California, Berkeley.
Take the Amazon Spheres, for instance. In the heart of Seattle, Washington, there exist these beguiling, large, and almost otherworldly glass orbs. Within them are housed not just any greenery, but the very stuff one might expect to find were one lost in the jungles of the Amazon Rainforest. From the outside, they seem like something that could only be true in one’s imagination. From the inside, by all accounts, they’re quite wondrous. One’s suspicions that they aren’t a marvelous concoction but instead entirely real must be confirmed by the signage nearby, which reads: “The Spheres. 7th and Leno