18 minute read
Foundations of Biophilia: Nature Immersion
BY JASON F. MCLENNAN
THE EMERGENCE OF BIOPHILIA AS A CRITICAL CONSIDERATION IN ARCHITECTURE:
I first wrote about the importance of biophilia in 2004 in my first book, The Philosophy of Sustainable Design. Ever since it has been a topic of great interest to me. I then included biophilia as a guiding principle in the 2.0 version of the Living Building Challenge that came out in 2009, making it the first green building program in the world to focus on the subject. Since then, I have watched the field of biophilic design evolve, gaining shape and definition and serious consideration on projects all over the globe.
However, as easily happens, a checklist mentality around biophilic design has emerged within the design industry, while simultaneously nearly anything and everything is being described as “biophilic” in order to satisfy this newfound interest. As has happened in other areas of green building, the essence and scientific basis of biophilia is being lost in point tallying; right now, a design need only include superficial applications and check the right boxes to call itself biophilic. Just stick a few biophilic patterns into an interior design and you are done!
In 2014, Terrapin Bright Green published its report 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design. This important contribution to the field identifies a range of patterns applied with the good intention of “addressing universal issues of human health and well-being.” We included reference to it in Living Building Challenge 3.0 as it was —and has remained—the best outline yet published. But since that time, I have seen it misused and certainly misunderstood by many. At times I’ve seen it used to
justify design responses that have nothing to do with biophilia as a serious pursuit. This waters down and undermines the credibility of this fledgling design focus.
As I have sat with this work and seen it used by design teams from multiple talented architecture firms around the country I have come to the following key conclusions. At face value, the Patterns describe a fairly complete framing of the topic, organized into three main categories: Nature in the Space, Natural Analogs, and Nature of the Space. But, while the authors note that “as new evidence comes to bear, it is entirely possible that some patterns will be championed over others,” they otherwise say nothing about the relative importance of each – an omission, as they are clearly not equal in their wellness impacts.
Explicitly pointing the biophilic design practitioner toward the more impactful patterns and interventions could improve the biophilic efficacy of many designs. Some of the patterns, if applied in isolation, are likely not much more effective than a placebo and make little to no impact in negating the lack of environmental stimuli that biophilic design attempts to address. For example, “visual connection to nature” is significantly more important to our well-being than “biomorphic forms and patterns,” but the two erroneously share similar emphasis by many practitioners who are striving not to meet the essence of biophilia in their design moves, but the mandates of a checklist.
Further, the logic and justification for many of the patterns is built on the fact that their set of characteristics can be found in healthy, diverse, natural settings to which we need exposure. However, these same sets of characteristics can also be found in unhealthy or otherwise unbiophilic environments as well. It is important for the biophilic designer to understand that just because biophilic environments contain the components named in these patterns, those components do not necessarily add up to a positive biophilic environment. In other words, the mere presence of the patterns of biophilia are easily and often confused with their intended effect on experience.
The Patterns authors seemed to have some wariness of this possibility when they said, “Adding multiple biophilic strategies for the sake of diversity may backfire unless they are integrative and support a unified design intent.” They also knew and acknowledged many times in their report ways in which the field needed to mature and broaden its understanding of this science and its application to this emerging design consciousness.
This three-part article series attempts to add another layer to the groundwork laid by Terrapin Bright Green—another lens through which we can assess the success of our work as biophilic designers. I want to acknowledge it’s not the patterns themselves that add up to successful biophilic design, and that what we experience is correlated by the quality of the characteristic as well as the duration of exposure—not merely its categorical presence.
Efficacy of Biophilic Interventions
Galen Carlson
It is my hope that clearly naming what is essential to biophilia will engender a more nuanced understanding and ultimately more successful application of biophilic patterns and attributes to design. Frameworks and checklists will always benefit designers, suggesting modalities and opportunities for incorporating biophilic experiences into our built environments so opportunities aren’t forgotten or overlooked. But it’s time to dig in deeper to what we mean when we talk about biophilia and biophilic design. We need to focus on design strategies that actually have positive impacts and do more than merely justify a design through yet another trendy lens. All of this is to say we need to understand more clearly – what is foundational to biophilia and biophilic design really? How can we clarify what matters the most?
The three overall categories—Nature in the Space, Natural Analogs, and Nature of the Space—work as an overall framing, but there is another macro framing that I posit could be useful to practitioners in addition:
1. Opportunities for Nature Immersion
2. Opportunities for Nature Relationship
3. Opportunities for Nature Interdependencies
FOUNDATION 1:Opportunities for Nature Immersion
Science is only recently corroborating the long-standing, instinctual wisdom we’ve carried as humans for millennia—that we thrive in close connection to nature. I believe nature immersion is the single most important element of biophilia, and if we only allow ourselves adequate time in nature, we can reap bountiful biophilia associated wellness benefits. But as a species, we’ve marched out of nature and into concrete jungles.
Estimates place 70% of the world’s populations in urban environments by 2050. With this migration, our connection to nature has dwindled and our feelings of isolation, loneliness, and depression have filled the vacancy. 1 Harvard School of Public Health Professor John Spangler puts a number to our disconnection from nature, and it’s shocking: Americans now spend 95% of their time inside. 2 At the same time, a growing body of evidence suggests that if we reconnect to nature, we will become whole again.
A key principle to establish under the framework of nature immersion is that any design that can get people outside, for as long as possible—using porches, covered walkways, courtyards, balconies, etc.—will always greatly outdistance anything that can be done inside a building. These types of design features prolong our exposure to nature, drawing down that 95%. No amount of interior architectural biophilic design intervention will ever negate our need to spend time outside in nature, so the highest order of business for the biophilic designer—and truly society—is to create spaces that draw people out and keep them there for more than a few minutes each day. The task isn’t the architect’s alone, but also the landscape architect’s, the urban planner’s, and each individual that occupies a building. The patterns of our lives must change, and our cities and our architecture—in order to be called biophilic—must support this change.
BIOPHILIC DESIGN AT THE CITY PLANNING LEVEL
In “Biophilic Design: A New Scale Emerges,” my recent article, I illustrated the relationship between where we live (i.e. amount and type of exposure we have to the natural world via our everyday lives) to the relative amount of biophilic design intervention needed to optimize our health and well-being. I illustrated a logarithmic relationship between the two —as one increases the urbanization of one’s environment, one’s need for biophilic design interventions increases exponentially. By contrast, in rural or wild places where peoples’ lifestyles still revolve around a foundational connection to nature, and the outdoors are not tamed in the way they are in the city, perhaps biophilic architectural design matters little (although still nice to have).
New York’s High Line Park, as of 2014, has averaged 5 million visitors a year since it opened in 2009.
Given so much of us live in or are moving to urban environments, we must, at a city planning scale, do the work of the biophilic designer to draw people outside through design. What do our cities look like? City parks provide immense opportunities for immersive experiences to urban dwellers and we should urgently create more, even on a small, pocket park scale. How many parks do we have and how equitably are they dispersed? One recent, powerful study showed significant decreases in self-reported feelings of depression in test groups tasked with restoring vacant lots in economically depressed urban areas. This study illuminates the social justice aspect inherent in any discussion about urban planning and access to nature: “neighborhood physical conditions, including vacant or dilapidated spaces, trash, and lack of quality infrastructure such as sidewalks and parks, are associated with depression and are factors that may explain the persistent prevalence of mental illness in resource-limited communities.” 3 As the populations of our cities grow, it is important that public places for them to be in nature keep pace. It is my belief that everyone should have walking distance access to a beautiful public park.
Also, as the world’s population continues to move into towns and mid-size cities grow into large cities, cities should strategically plan for and conserve sizable tracts of land as highly accessible urban wildlands. Stanley Park in Vancouver, Forest Park in Portland, and Central Park in New York City provide crucial, substantive outlets for high quality nature immersion for their urban areas and highlight what’s possible when the conditions for wildness are fostered rather than subdued by design within city limits. These conserved parks connect people with place in a powerful way, often providing them with an experience of what their place once looked like while simultaneously creating opportunities for the native ecology of that place to thrive. Living in close proximity to this kind of life has amazing potential to foster the stewardship mentality crucial to our wild places.
Portland’s Forest Park, at 5,200 acres, is one of the largest urban forests in the country, providing immersive nature experiences for this rapidly growing urban area.
What further opportunities can we identify to foster nature connections in cities? Do or can trails winding through untamed places connect us to the modern and convenient amenities that spurred our move as a species to cities? What is the state of our urban canopy and how can we revitalize it, and reap the associated biophilic benefits alongside all the others that make trees so essential to city landscapes? What is our relationship to water in our cities? Can we utilize design to daylight streams and storm water, creating visual and auditory connections with our life-source at every opportunity? Are our cities walkable and bikable, with amenities spaced for pedestrian and biker access? I believe one of the reasons Americans flocked to the suburbs in the post-World War II era was for these kinds of natural connections that had been choked out of industrialized cities. As our urban populations rise, it is critical that we invite nature back into their centers, creating nature-pedestrian connections that get us walking and interacting with our surrounding natural and human communities, immersing us more often and more completely within biophilic settings.
Milan’s Vertical Forest, an amazing residential building covered in trees.
Shutterstock
BIOPHILIC DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE
Architecture itself cannot mend our disconnection from nature – the inanimate can’t make us whole— but it can foster that connection by elegantly and comprehensively seizing each opportunity to connect us with nature. As with urban planners, the architect’s number one priority is decreasing the amount of time people spend inside through supporting nature immersion with constant connections to the outdoors and bringing the outside in.
Interior environments are, by their very nature, controlled and limited in sensory richness when compared to outside, not by a little, but by an order of magnitude of thousands. What we experience when we’re immersed in nature is complex, layered, simultaneous, and multisensory, full of variability, chaos, and other life-giving and life-affirming stimuli. Proactively bringing aspects of this experience into our interior designs certainly reminds us of our connection to nature. What we need though is not a la carte biophilic features, but exposure to the layered complexity of life. Outside, there is no disconnect between what the senses experience. Life’s patterns are not teased apart into their constituent pieces, neatly enumerated and categorized as non-visual connection, or visual connection. Biophilia can’t be extracted from one context, reduced to parts and pieces, and added into an environment as a formula. Like John Muir remarked, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
The biophilic designer is invited to expand their view of biophilia beyond a checklist of interior, superficial biophilic applications to this larger, more critical need: connecting their design to the outdoors at every opportunity, creating porches, courtyards, interstitial spaces, inside/ outside flow, ensuring that windows frame views down corridors, and that outdoor experiences are properly designed for their particular climate. Attention paid in design to strategically creating multiple points of entry and exit, living close to the ground from which life emerges, creating interstitial spaces that allow people to be outside for longer periods of time, and insisting that every inside space have some outside connection and natural daylight, go far to meet our biophilic needs and are the ultimate mark of a truly biophilic design. The goal of the design is to draw out and keep occupants immersed in nature for as much of the time as is possible and where practical to bring outside elements inside.
Amazon’s spheres in Seattle provide a quality immersive experience for the company’s employees in the middle of the city.
Galen Carlson
To think that architecture could ever negate our need for nature immersion is maybe convenient but doesn’t hold up to science. While biophilic interior design interventions do play an essential role in that they serve as reminders and symbols of our connection to nature, they are truly secondary. Ultimately, their value is also in their ability to draw us outside, by gently reminding us of an immersive experience and creating a longing for more.
Getting outside is of course the first step, but what is the nature of the outside you get to? What is the quality of it? What is the level of immersion with diversity and quantity of life? How talented was your landscape architect? How well does the architect draw us out? People need connection with functioning ecosystems; how does the design surrounding your structures support that? Incredible pockets of diversity and rich habitat can be created even in small urban spaces. Actively engaging in the regeneration of the land upon which we build is a critical part of biophilic design. More attention paid to the spaces between buildings— entrances, internal courtyards, front and back yards, setbacks and city right of ways—counts, and is in fact crucial as this is often where people get the entirety of their exposure to nature in urban environments.
Through this lens, we begin to see design and architecture as supportive armature and gentle guide, and, if successful, capable of shepherding us back out each time we move in. It is not our buildings that are truly biophilic, only the life that they support and frame and to which they connect. The architect doesn’t design biophilia, they design for it.
THE ROLE OF SOCIETY
Our need to be surrounded by life and life-like processes is deeply embedded in our shared history with thousands of other species over hundreds of thousands of years. It is only in recent history that we’ve shifted to spending most of our time in nearly sterile environments and thus even need to care so much about this topic. As a result, we need and long for—consciously and subconsciously—an immersion in the kinds of environments in which we evolved. We—as individuals, as members of a community, as employers, as parents and caregivers of children—must also look for ways to draw down the amount of time we spend inside. As we’ve already seen, our cities can and should support this, our homes and businesses and schools can and should support this. Further, our policies should support this, reintroducing long, outside recess times for children during the school day, and biophilia breaks for employees in the work day. As individuals, we need to understand our own needs for nature immersion and advocate for our well-being, for breaks during the work day, sufficient time off, and the general flexibility to maintain adequate time in our busy lives for nature immersion. We need to build outside time into our lives through our commutes, physical activity, and our habits and schedules. We need to insist that our children spend time outside and provide models for them of a life that is connected to nature.
Playing outside is crucial to childhood development, but school recess has been significantly reduced or eliminated in 40% of US school districts. 9
Further, we must understand that it is primarily the quality of the experience of nature that matters. Not all interactions and interventions are equal in their efficacy. The impact of time spent in nature correlates with how immersive and diverse the experience is. I strongly believe if you can only spend a bit of time in nature, the more immersive and ecologically diverse the better.
A clear relationship exists between quality and quantity here; the higher the quality of an experience (as defined by biodiversity and direct exposure to the elements), the less exposure time we likely need to benefit from it (but I don’t think there is a maximum—spend as much as you can!). Much of the outdoor time we do get is—to a large extent—tamed and manicured. Gardens, parks, and lawns all represent outdoor spaces in which we might spend a great deal of time, but which will never equal the potency of an experience in a wilder place, teeming with unmanipulated life—though certainly much better than time spent inside.
If we imagine a gradient of ecological diversity and health—with sterile interior spaces and sterile exterior spaces on one end and untamed wilderness at the other, and an associated scale of impact, we can see how the wilder and more sensory-rich the environment the more it activates all of our senses. The more activated our senses are by our experiences outdoors, the higher the associated impact to our health and well-being.
THE QUALITY NATURE IMMERSION EXPERIENCE
Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing, is a new name assigned to an ancient and intuitive practice: that of regularly immersing oneself in a forest setting. The practice doesn’t aspire to fitness benchmarks or any other quantifiable metrics. It is a deep qualitative and experiential process whereby the practitioner invites their body to utilize its full array of senses to absorb the songs, sights, patterns, bouquets, textures, and even taste of the forest. Shinrin-yoku is about noticing for the sake of noticing, and thereby remembering at a deeply intuitive level our connection to and part in the patterns and cycles, ebb and flow, inhalation and exhalation of life. There is no goal, no measuring, no checklist; the invitation given by this practice is just to engage the senses with life, to wonder, not for some inherent usefulness, but for its own merit. E. O. Wilson famously said, “every species is a masterpiece.” Forest bathing encourages its practitioners to be witnesses to the masterpieces that surround them in a forest setting.
Prescribed as preventative medicine in Japan, Shinrin-yoku has been proven to boost immunity, 4 reduce blood pressure, 5 reduce measurable and reported levels of stress, 6 improve mood, increase ability to focus and problem solve, 7 increase recovery from injury and illness, increase energy levels, and improve sleep. Interestingly, one study showed that walking in a forest setting for fifty minutes improves memory, while walking for that same amount of time in a city does not. 8
Shinrin-yoku is about noticing for the sake of noticing, and thereby remembering at a deeply intuitive level our connection to and part in the patterns and cycles, ebb and flow, inhalation and exhalation of life.
Many immersive experiences that bring the practitioner to the present moment are powerful in similar ways: camping, fly fishing, birding, hunting, horseback riding, hiking – all of these activities place us in situations where we’re entirely surrounded by nature and engage us in actions that require the entirety of our attention. It is this combination of the meditative quality of these activities with the settings in which we enjoy them that is so impactful. In fact, this most closely reflects what we’ve really evolved to do. One can argue that we are most ourselves when immersed in nature, corralling every ounce of our attention and energy toward some such task on which at some point in our evolutionary history we might have been dependent for our very survival. We tap into a primal and instinctual self in these settings.
Alex Mondau
For me, being on the water is the ultimate experience, matched only by being in the water in nature. Flyfishing is an immersive experience—requiring the engagement of each sense while standing waist deep, in two worlds at once.
CONCLUSION
The biophilic designer has another role to play as well. It’s important to understand what we need most as a baseline. The designer—as a primary end user of scientific data when it comes to the study of nature immersion’s effects on people and wellness—has an obligation to be in dialogue with the research community. A feedback loop here would hone that scientific study, helping us more accurately pinpoint what our quantifiable goals should be regarding biophilia in our designs.
Ultimately, a combination of these layers—the quality of the environment, the amount of time spent in it, the relative health and vulnerabilities of the person in question—overlap to inform how much and what kind of nature immersion is needed. While it’s not exactly a formula, we can see the relationship between all these facets and understand that, for instance, an hour in a city park doesn’t have as profound an effect as an hour in a national park. Or when we’re under a huge amount of stress, the more time we can spend outside the better, and the quality of that time increases as we seek out more sensory rich and ecologically diverse places.
It is our job as individuals and members of design communities to recognize and deploy every opportunity to spend time in nature, creating through our designs opportunities for more life to exist, regenerating sites and bringing more vitality and diversity to the wild spaces in which we spend time—not only because building habitat is the right thing to do, but because its implications to our health and wellbeing are considerable and critical to our ability to thrive in cities. As we shift our habits and practices toward creating opportunities for life, we will engage with that life more and we could see that even with more of us moving to cities each year, we’re spending more, not less time outside, as happier, healthier people.
The implications of a societal shift toward recognizing, understanding, and honoring our own biophilic natures can have profound effects not only on our health as a species, but on the health of the planet. Environmentalist and forestry engineer Baba Dioum said, “In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.” We now understand the many and deep benefits of immersion in nature. If we translate this understanding into knowledge that we teach our children and reintroduce into society, creating the conditions for this innate love of life to find full expression and potential in our lives, neighborhoods, cities, and beyond we will experience the true power of biophilia in connecting us, and ultimately conserving life. •
ENDNOTES
1 Bennett, Kevin. “3 Ways that City Living is Linked with Psychological Illness.” Psychology Today. July 6, 2018.
2 Spengler, John. Harvard School of Public Health. https://www.hsph.harvard. edu/john-spengler/
3 South EC, Hohl BC, Kondo MC, MacDonald JM, Branas CC. Effect of Greening Vacant Land on Mental Health of Community-Dwelling Adults: A Cluster Randomized Trial. JAMA Netw Open. 2018;1(3):e180298. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.0298
4 Li Q, Morimoto K, Nakadai A, Inagaki H, Katsumata M, Shimizu T, Hirata Y, Hirata K, Suzuki H, Miyazaki Y, Kagawa T, Koyama Y, Ohira T, Takayama N, Krensky AM, Kawada T. Forest bathing enhances human natural killer activity and expression of anti-cancer proteins. Int J Immunopathol Pharmacol. 2007 Apr- Jun;20(2 Suppl 2):3-8.
5 Sifferlin, Alexandra. “Why Spring is the Perfect Time to Take Your Workout Outdoors.” Time. March 30, 2017.
6 Gregory N. Bratman, J. Paul Hamilton, Kevin S. Hahn, Gretchen C. Daily, James J. Gross. Nature reduces rumination and sgPFC activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jul 2015, 112 (28) 8567 8572; DOI:10.1073/ pnas.1510459112
7 Ketler, Alanna. “Doctors Explain How Hiking Actually Changes Our Brains.” Collective Evolution. April 8, 2016.
8 Bergman, Marc, et al. The Cognitive Benefits of Interacting with Nature.
9 Zygmunt-Fillwalk and Bidello, 2005, as cited in The State of Play report, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
JASON F. McLENNAN is a highly sought out designer, consultant and thought leader. Prior to founding McLennan Design, Jason authored the Living Building Challenge – the most stringent and progressive green building program in existence, and founded the International Living Future Institute. He is the author of six books on Sustainability and Design including the Philosophy of Sustainable Design, “the bible for green building.”
