J. E. Ferrari
"Over thousands of generations the mind evolved within a ripening culture, creating itself out of symbols and tools, and genetic advantage accrued from planned modifications of the environment. The unique operations of the brain are the result of natural selection operating through the filter of culture. They have suspended us between the two antipodal ideals of nature and machine, forest and city, the natural and the artificial, relentlessly seeking, in the words of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, an equilibrium not of this world."
-Edward O. Wilson
In the beginning pages of Biophilia, Wilson summons images of the primeval paradise - archetypal images beholden to nature. He references the 19th century landscape paintings of Albert Birstadt, Fredrick Edwin Church, and Thomas Cole - pictures captured during the exploration of the American West and the hinterlands of South America. Yet, Wilson states, during our own lifetimes these images have faded. "The wildernesses of the world have shriveled into timber leases and threatened nature reserves. Their parlous state presents us with a dilemma, which the historian Leo Marx has called the machine in the garden."2 This garden, the natural world, "is the refuge of the spirit, remote, static, richer even than human imagination."3 But, as Wilson observes, "we cannot exist in this paradise without the machine that tears it apart. We are killing the thing we love, our Eden, progenitrix and sibyl."4 Le Corbusier did not concede to this dilemma, looking from his position in history he idealized the potentials of technology in his modern image of the building as a 'machine for living' set in the garden. He can be forgiven for his optimism, however the same is not true for our contemporary American culture with its linear, myopic technophilia.
In these images of machine and garden is present the duality of conception that has separated us as human beings from the rest of the natural world - a duality that has emerged together with our ability to modify the surrounding environment through the use of tools. But is this an inherent duality? Wilson's statement appears true; we cannot exist in this paradise without our machines. Yet we have made a fundamental assumption that the machine itself is not, and cannot be, an integral and possibly fundamental piece of nature's web.
Each species has developed mechanisms for the highly efficient use of a particular niche; sometimes these mechanisms include the ability to modify the environment. A commonly misunderstood aspect of ecology is that natural selection depends on competition and conflict. However, a more nuanced theory sees the evolution of species diversity as a product of increased specialization in order to avoid conflict and resource competition. A species specializes in order to make use of a niche that in evolutionary time is not yet being occupied by another species. The species literally invents the niche as its place, its habitat, and its resource base as it invents itself to occupy it. Thus, hundreds of thousands of years of interrelated coevolution have resulted in those incredibly dynamic intermeshings of relationships which we call ecosystems.
Homo sapiens' uniquely evolved specialization in tool making has created a contradictory effect. Instead of giving us a very specific and limited habitation niche, it has allowed us to expand our range of habitable places by invading the niches of other species. Our specialization, rather than facilitating the colonization of a previously uninhabited niche or enabling the invention of a niche, has given us the overwhelming opportunity to invade or prey upon the niches of other organisms.
So what does this have to do with architecture? Buildings are the manifestations of our unique ability to occupy almost any given place, habitat, geography, ecotone, climate zone etc. Building construction and maintenance represent the largest single component of total human resource consumption. In terms of impact on the natural environment, or 'ecological footprint,' buildings are our machine number one. What if we were to conceive of our buildings, towns, and cities as unique niches themselves, invented and grown out of untapped potentials within the natural system; niches within the interstices of ecosystems, products of our coevolution with other species; niches which avoid competition and conflict, rather than imagining them as invasive, voracious machines? We might then come a long way in reconciling the unique specialization of our species with our fundamentally biophilic origin and existence, and we may just find an equilibrium - of this world.
The term biophilia was first defined and described by Harvard biologist Prof. Edward O. Wilson in 1984 as "The innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes."5 He later expanded upon this definition, calling biophilia "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms. Innate means hereditary and hence part of ultimate human nature."6 In Origins of Architectural Pleasure, Grant Hildebrand relates the concept of biophilia to the built environment. Hildebrand observes that within the span of human existence, the era in which humans have constructed environments for themselves is like a blink of an eye compared to the vast time spent in the ancestral habitat of the African savanna. He argues that humans find built spaces "that would have improved our chances of survival"7 to be more habitable. This primal habitability is the essence of their appeal and is why Homo sapiens continue to be attracted to these evolutionary selected design attributes.
There is significant quantitative data that corroborates with the biophilia hypothesis, showing that greater contact with such elements of the natural world as sunlight, outdoor air, and living plants has been linked to increased productivity in workers, improvement in learning rates in students, and reduced stress, faster recovery time, and decreased use of painkillers in patients.8
In 1984 Roger Ulrich completed a well know and striking study linking views of nature to improved hospital patient recovery. "The patients were assigned essentially randomly to rooms that were identical except for window view: one member of each pair overlooked a small stand of deciduous trees; the other had a view of a brown brick wall. Patients with the natural window view had shorter postoperative hospital stays, had fewer negative comments in nurses' notes ("patient is upset," "needs much encouragement"), and tended to have lower scores for minor post-surgical complications such as persistent headache or nausea requiring medication. Moreover, the wall-view patients required many more injections of potent painkillers, whereas the tree-view patients more frequently received weak oral analgesics such as acetaminophen.9
There is mounting evidence that our machines have separated us from the natural world to such an extent that they are decreasing our own fitness as a species, to say nothing of the impact they have had on total species diversity of the planet.
Stephen R. Kellert, a preeminent researcher on Biophilia and Professor of Social Ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, is currently undertaking a research initiative that aims to identify and quantify biophilic design attributes within the built environment. This research has the potential of providing hard data that might support the biophilia hypothesis and its relation to environmental design. The ultimate hope is that the study's results will measurably demonstrating the importance of a complex connection between the natural and constructed environments. Such evidence could be a profound tool and a powerful incentive for developers, planners, and architects to reconceive the fundamental building and construction paradigm which has resulted in machines that unnaturally isolate us from this world in which we are continually evolving - a world of unimaginable diversity and complexity, which, as Wilson argues, the human spirit is innately dependant on for sanity and survival.
Kieran Timberlake's design for Sidwell Friends Middle School has been thoughtfully guided by design concepts drawn from biophilia theory. The client's ideological interest in human relationships with the natural world was the motivating force behind our biophilic design ethic. The educational program became an ideal vehicle for developing many of the ideas for a building that would facilitate a visceral understanding of, and a restorative relationship with the natural world. As a provocative shift of paradigm, Sidwell Friends Middle School might be conceived of as a 'restorative niche', rather than a 'machine for living'. Sidwell Friends Middle School is currently being used as one of the case study buildings for Stephen Kellert's research. It is also a candidate for the US Green Building Council's LEED Platinum certification.
Biophilic Design Concepts:
- use of diffuse and direct sunlight
- frequent opportunities for spontaneous contact with nature
- use of local, natural materials
- visual/material connections between interior and exterior surfaces
- passive natural ventilation
- direct physical connection to exterior from interior spaces
- direct visual access to landscape from interior spaces
- zero net energy consumption, or net energy production
- access to open water
- complexity and order
- moments of enticement and even peril
- prospect and refuge
ENDNOTES
1. Edward O. Wilson. Biophilia. Harvard University Press. Cambridge: 1984. p.12.
2. Wilson, p.11-12.
3. Wilson, p.11-12.
4. Wilson, p.11-12.
5. Wilson, p.1.
6. Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic. p. 31.
7. Grant Hildebrand, The Origins of Architectural Pleasure. p. 10.
8. See Heschong Mahone Group, 2001. Sterling and Sterling, 1983. Hartig, Mang, Evans 1991.
M.J. West 1985.
9. Roger Ulrich, "Biophilia, Biophobia, and Natural Landscapes," pp. 106-107.
CITED TEXTS
Hildebrand, Grant. The Origins of Architectural Pleasure, Berkeley: Univirsity of California Press, 1999.
Wilson, Edward O. Biophilia. Harvard University Press. Cambridge: 1984.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1964).
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophilia: A study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values
(Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974).
Heerwagen, Judith H. & Orians, Gordon H., "Humans, Habitats, and Aesthetics," in Kellert,
Stephen R. & Wilson, E. O., eds., The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993
Hull IV, Bruce R. & Revell, Grant R. B., "Cross-Cultural Comparison of Landscape Scenic
Beauty Evaluations: A Case Study in Bali" in Journal of Environmental Psychology 9(1989):177-191
Kellert, Stephen R., Kinship to Mastery: Biophilia in Human Evolution & Development.
Washington D.C.: Island Press, 1997
Ulrich, Roger S., "Biophilia, Biophobia, and Natural Landscapes," in Kellert, Stephen R. &
Wilson, E. O., eds., The Biophilia Hypothesis. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993.
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