Don’t worry, the moon will rise
wherever you go. It does even here,
miles away from the land’s monopoly
of red barns and bent grasses.
—MARY JO BANG, “How to Leave a Prairie”
The sky is a tarpaulin lashed: it leaves
no way for crawling out.
And even you are planted here,
who seemed to choose otherwise . . .
—ROSANNA WARREN, “A Cypress”
Many years ago, I spent three months traveling around the Indian subcontinent. From Dhaka, Bangladesh, I jostled on third-class trains and wedged my sweaty way into brightly painted buses, zigzagging through northern India, from Kolkata on the eastern coast to Mumbai on the west, detouring farther north for a brief sojourn in Nepal. Those months changed me and my life in countless explicable and inexplicable ways. One in particular I recall several times a month.
Early one morning a bus disgorged me in Delhi, where the old city’s huddled, disintegrating streets and buildings became the datum for my days and memories—hot, dirty, colorful, and overrun with honking buses and cars, bicycle whistles, shouting people, crying and laughing children. On that first scorching day, spent navigating dust-covered streets and dirt alleys by rickshaw and on foot, I happened at sunset into the serene green expanse of a well-tended park, the Lodhi Gardens. My body flooded with relief: I’d escaped, escaped the hours upon assaultive hours of stress I hadn’t even known I felt. Making my way into the gardens and up a small hillock, I was stopped, as if by the brute force of an angry man, by a small stone building, a monument.
MOHAMMED SHAH SAYYID’S eight-sided tomb, built in 1445, is like Kahn and Tyng’s Trenton Bath House: that rare architectural composition that manages to be at once small and monumental. Something akin to an early Romanesque baptistery, its heavy, sloping piers buttress its corners to exaggerate the weight of its planar, masonry simplicity. Canted walls, compressed proportions, and opaque surfaces make Mohammed Shah’s tomb look as though it erupted from the earth moments before. Steady, stolid, tense with energy.
Mohammed Shah’s tomb, Lodhi Gardens, Delhi, India. © Tibor Bognar/AGE Fotostock/VIEW.
It had become too dark to photograph, the sun almost wholly departed for the day. Searching for light, I glanced up to behold the stars in the handle of the Big Dipper glowing along with the moon in the sky. That same instant I recalled standing in a wide-open field half a world away, a child, exploring the fields on my family’s farm in central Vermont. Watching the moon rise as the sun set; counting the one, two, three stars in the handle of the Big Dipper. And now here I was, all the way in India. Standing on an open, green plain, watching the moon rise as the sun set, counting one, two, three.
No matter where we live—no matter when we’ve lived, I thought in wonder—people have been searching for light, looking at this moon. Feeling relief as they step onto a soft green horizon, feeling the force that drives that green fuse. When confronted with the tomb’s canted walls, bearing witness to this visible manifestation of the earth’s elemental forces, to the gravity that pulls us down, down, always down, back onto the surface of the earth.
In the contemporary world, ever more people inhabit ever denser and primarily built environments that are, by definition, ever further removed from the natural world. Humanity’s estrangement from nature is but the continuation of an age-old process of building, which originated less as a locus for economic self-improvement and more in the interest of survival. Safe, durable ready-made shelters in nature are scarce. So people build them. As larger aggregations of shelters became settlements, the more durable political, social, and cultural institutions of civilization took hold, requiring more construction. Eventually, settlements became large enough to require infrastructure, so humans constructed still more, buildings and aqueducts and bridges and sanitation systems, all to support their lives in built environments. Progressively, whenever and wherever financial means conjoined with new technological developments, highways, subways, parks, parking garages, supermarkets, and power plants followed.
The story of human history is a story of building, perpetually building to accommodate actual and imagined needs. Human-made environments fulfill functions and offer amenities that nature cannot, so we tend to conceptualize them as nature’s antithesis—machines in gardens, standing tall against the ferocity and fickleness of the elements. But in truth, nature shapes how people experience the environments they build. Our human bodies—two eyes on our face, two arms at our sides, two feet on the ground, a head perched atop a gravity-defying skeleton—evolved over tens and hundreds of thousands of years by adapting to nature’s forms and rhythms, by successfully confronting its challenges and seizing its opportunities, by discovering safety in its sheltered corners and possibility in its airy expanses. Our bodies flourish and perish on this and no other earth: we thinking, breathing, sentient creatures sleep when it’s dark and amble in the light, drink and bathe in water and consume its animal and vegetable offerings until, when it’s time, we dissolve to dust.
Our experience of ourselves is embodied—situated in our bodies—and these human bodies of ours are also situated in the foundational environment of the natural world. Nature’s geography and physical elements radically shape human cognitive experience in myriad ways. Nature restores us. All we need to become aware of its salutary effects is to step outside and take a deep breath, or pass from a crowded sidewalk into a verdant park. Some of the profoundest ways that nature affects us take place elsewhere, outside our conscious awareness, as our bodies and brains respond biologically, neurochemically to nature’s cornucopia of offerings. We may know that a dearth of fresh air or a paucity of greenery or a scarcity of natural light degrades the moods of people vulnerable to depression. But such factoids misrepresent how pervasively nature’s presence or absence influences people’s cognitions and emotions. For even if we do appreciate the importance of nature in the abstract, we tend not to apply that knowledge to our own experience, especially since a great deal of the time, most of us simultaneously pay little attention to our environments and enjoy an inflated sense of our own agency. In casting about for the reasons underlying a dark mood or an embarrassing senior moment, most people would be unlikely to consider the hours they’d just spent in a windowless room.
Human life in the natural world gave rise to and shaped the structures and capacities of our minds and bodies. Our long evolution in earth’s varied habitats and ecosystems, each with its own climate, topography, and greenery, imbued us with sensitivities to and proclivities for certain environmental patterns and ways of being in the landscape. My sense of relief upon entering Delhi’s Lodhi Gardens, which afforded me the opportunity to replenish my depleted cognitive resources, exemplifies one such legacy. Another is that people are drawn to enclosed areas (where we can take refuge) coupled with views of and access to open, expansive terrain where we can “prospect” for opportunities.
People Need Nature
Humans have inhabited the earth for between 200,000 and 450,000 years. Until the last 10,000 years or so, we dwelled in varied climates including, but not confined to, the temperate, grass-covered savannahs that covered swaths of sub-Saharan Africa. Nomadism slowly dissipated with the dawning of agriculture, which more or less coincided with the establishment of permanent settlements where people organized themselves into progressively larger and more complex social constellations. Many scholars date the earliest cities to between 4000 and 3000 BCE; ancient Uruk, one of humanity’s earliest cities (in today’s Iraq), contained between 50,000 and 80,000 inhabitants. Even with the birth of urban societies, though, for many thousands of years after, most people continued to inhabit overwhelmingly unbuilt, nonurban settings.
The large-scale urbanization that facilitates and accompanies modern economic development railroaded through local cultures, resources, and across Europe and eventually around the globe, in the last two hundred years. Today ever more of us dwell in metropolitan areas, yet for all but a tiny fraction of Homo sapiens’s time on earth, the environments we inhabited were dominated by nature’s rhythms and patterns. During those previous hundreds of thousands of years, generation after generation of humans successfully negotiated nature’s diversity, managed its challenges, and achieved sufficient enough mastery over its elements. From the standpoint of our evolution, modern cities, let alone megacities, are so recent that humans have not had time to biologically adapt.
Genetically we are predisposed to crave and take a singular kind of pleasure in environments where nature’s presence is palpable. Even if systematic and individual variations exist in our proclivity for nature owing to personality, gender, age, and cultural upbringing—and they do—we embodied humans have evolved as a biophilic species; meaning that we are drawn to nature: we like to feel a connection to it in our homes, our offices, our communities. Our very genes are encoded to link our well-being—our being well and our feeling well—to sustaining an intimate connection with the natural world. This applies to urban dwellers and to country folk, to people in all kinds of environments, to people of every ethnicity.
Countless studies reveal our biologically grounded dependence on nature. Consider, for example, two adjacent, architecturally identical residential courtyards located in the same low-rise housing complex in Chicago. One, which we’ll call the Green Courtyard, contained plantings, grass, and trees. The other, the Gray Courtyard, was paved with concrete. Same city. Same neighborhood. Same building design. Residents of similar socioeconomic status and background. Yet the lives of the two sets of residents—especially the children—differed depending upon which one they called home, with residents of the Green Courtyard buildings markedly healthier, physically and psychologically. Green Courtyarders coped better with stress. They better managed interpersonal conflict. Most astonishing, the children exhibited superior overall cognitive functioning. Dozens of subsequent studies confirm these findings, including work in recent years on communities in Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Youngstown, Ohio, correlating significantly reduced incidences of crime (both property and violent) to increased greenery in public places.
At least one reason why regular access to nature reduces crime rates and stress is that it improves people’s cognitive faculties. We know that people’s ability to concentrate with focused effort when they need to is a critical faculty that facilitates so much of our ability to think clearly and effectively. We also know that this ability is easily depleted. According to environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, enjoying a natural landscape replenishes our attentional resources effectively by promoting what they call effortless focus. Natural environments engage our curiosity and attention without willful determination on our part.
Residents of housing projects thrive when nature is visible and accessible, and don’t when it isn’t: Ida B. Wells Housing, Chicago, Illinois [demolished]. Chicago Architectural Photographing Company, ca. 1950s. CP-C_01_C_0265_004, University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections.
The greater a city dweller’s access to greenery, light, and open spaces, the better she will solve problems and understand and take in new information; the more mastery she has over her limited attentional resources, directing and sustaining them where and when she wants; and the more effective she will be in regulating her emotions. All this translates into improved psychological well-being and better interpersonal relations. And there’s more. Residents lucky enough to live in a housing development surrounded by vegetation—trees, grass, flowers—enjoy and maintain stronger social ties with their neighbors; they enjoy a sense of community more robust than residents in similar buildings lacking in these natural features. Green Courtyard residents also believed that their environs were safer than Gray Courtyard residents did, and the crime statistics data have consistently supported their perceptions.
Building cities that neglect our human need for nature strains public resources and exacts a high cost on everyone. Yet legions of affordable housing developments—ones already built and ones still on the drawing boards—ignore or pay lip service, at best, to these fundamental human needs. For this reason and for many other reasons, all but a few of this country’s affordable housing developments disadvantage the very people they purport to help. Exceptions like the green-roofed, multi-terraced Via Verde in the Bronx, developed by Jonathan Rose Companies, and designed by Grimshaw Architects in collaboration with Dattner Architects, only seem to prove the rule.
Human biophilia, or love of nature, influences not only our built environmental experience in the immediate moment but also in our memories. Nature’s presence or absence affects how we remember where we’ve been and therefore who we are. Recalling that people’s autobiographical memories are processed in the same part of the brain involved in cognitive mapping—autobiographical memories come packaged by place—means that our experiences with nature as children play a significant role in our sense of self and identity. Think about this in concrete terms. People remember the neighborhood in which they grew up more fondly if it offered meaningful access to nature. Part of what made your friend’s childhood a happy one was the easy access he had to a nearby park or the foliated view from his bedroom.
Affordable, sustainable, green, humane: Via Verde Housing (Grimshaw and Dattner), Bronx, New York. © David Sundberg/Esto.
Predictably, people’s biophilic preferences extend beyond the home. Whether we are toiling away at the office or working out at the health club, more access to nature better nurtures our well-being. Herman Miller, an office furniture company with a base in Zeeland, Michigan, confirmed this after it moved its employees from an outdated manufacturing facility into a new building designed by William McDonough + Partners which they called the “GreenHouse,” outfitted with courtyards, internal gardens, and skylights. Daylight and greenery graced internal spaces, including corridors. Within six months, employees’ workplace satisfaction and performance measurably improved. After nine months, their productivity had increased by an astonishing 20 percent. Employees found themselves healthier, less distractible, more relaxed, and more highly motivated to work. In another study, merely substituting the standard levels of artificial ventilation used in most office environments with a level approximating a naturally ventilated space dramatically improved workers’ overall cognitive performance. Making workplace environments that simulate or evoke natural conditions, including natural light, positively impacts a company’s vitality; conversely, failing to do so exacts a cost, not only on employees’ sense of well-being but also on their health and productivity—the economic bottom line.
We have seen that placing a postsurgical patient in a hospital room with a pastoral view, rather than in one facing a brick wall, will result in a speedier and less painful recovery. When inpatients spend time in what hospital administrators call “healing gardens,” their heart rates slow and their cortisol and stress levels fall. Such effects transpire with astonishing rapidity: patients—indeed, even people unafflicted by medical maladies—become aware of them after three to five minutes. And these salutary physiological effects are measurable within just twenty seconds of such exposure. What makes for good healing also makes for good workplaces, good schools, and good homes. Designs that offer access to nature or simulate its greenery, climate, and topography affect us beneficially for the simple reason that people thrive in environments where nature continues to nourish our well-being.
In healing gardens, heart rates settle and cortisol levels fall within minutes: Crown Sky Garden, Lurie Children’s Hospital (Mikyoung Kim Design), Chicago, Illinois. Photography by Hedrich Blessing/courtesy of Mikyoung Kim Design.
Workplaces with ample natural light boost job satisfaction: conference room, Scottish Parliament (Enric Miralles/EMBT Architects), Edinburgh, Scotland. © Peter Cook/VIEW.
NATURE BEGINS WITH LIGHT
Among nature’s elemental features, sunlight is its most celebrated. Light. Daylight. Let there be light. Flooded with light, washing light, isn’t the light beautiful light. God saw the light, that it was good. Humans revere, indeed worship the light of the sun, and probably have since the beginning of our time on earth. And in built environments, natural light confers upon humans a plethora of salutary effects. Natural light remains qualitatively and quantitatively different from artificial light; it is hundreds of times brighter and more complex in spectral hue. Humans consistently prefer natural light, from which our bodies derive physiological and psychological benefits. Daylight delivers the sensible experience of warmth (or can); suppresses the body’s release of melatonin, the hormone that coddles us to sleep; nourishes our body with the vitamin D that buttresses our immune system and stimulates bone growth and strength. No one really needs evidence to establish people’s overwhelming reliance on and preference for natural light, but here it is: given a choice, people will consistently choose to spend their time in rooms where lumen levels approximate those that prompt the body to suppress the release of melatonin.
Even workplaces that offer more indirect than direct access to nature, but admit ample natural light, as through views and skylights in a conference room, report of higher levels of job satisfaction. Retail environments that cater to people’s innate preferences for daylight attract more customers and retain them longer. When one supermarket, which had been housed in the standard-issue windowless box, moved to a building outfitted with multiple skylights casting abundant natural light indoors, its sales increased by nearly 40 percent. Natural light, like pastoral views, heals the sick and improves the well-being even of the well by affecting our cognitive processes in profound, though sometimes subtle ways. That hospital inpatients placed in naturally illuminated rooms (even absent a view) sleep better and enjoy more regular circadian rhythms than their counterparts in artificially illuminated rooms is perhaps predictable. More surprising are the additional healthy effects of daylit rooms. Patients feel less stressed. They report feeling less pain and heal more quickly. They suffer lower rates of mortality. Subjective impressions are substantiated by measurable data.
Children in properly daylit classrooms focus better, retain information better, behave better, and score better on tests. Daylight measurably affects people’s moods (provided that glare and temperature are properly controlled) and is a proven palliative that alleviates the symptoms of mental illness, especially in people suffering from bipolar disorder and seasonal affective disorder. If daylight helps heal the sick, will it not also improve a sense of emotional balance in anyone?
Views and paths invite us to explore unknown places: Connecticut Water Treatment Facility (Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, building by Steven Holl). Photograph by Elizabeth Felicella.
Natural light, a boon to human physical and mental health, also smooths the way to easier social interactions. People don’t tend to notice their physical environments much anyway, but they do so even less when interacting with other people. Still, our nonconscious receptivity to natural light and its soothing properties persists. One study divided subjects into two groups and placed them in an identical social situation, with one group in a brighter room (1,000 lux of white light), the other in rooms with varying degrees of dimmer light. The subjects in the more brightly lit room quarreled less than their counterparts in the darker room.
We are so biologically wired to embrace the natural world that, in addition to greenery and light, we respond strongly to natural materials, biomorphic forms, and specific topographical features. These include ones that were critical to the African savannahs, where our ancestors thrived for tens of thousands of years: gently rolling hills, even ground cover, meandering pathways, and copses of trees and shrubbery that screen illuminated clearings. Think of New York’s City’s Central Park, or indeed any park, including this one surrounding a water treatment plant in Connecticut. We comprehend the overall structure of its “prospect and refuge” landscapes in one sweeping view, surveying the enticing places they offer for our exploration. Without even thinking about it, we can identify the areas where we can take refuge to hide and to rest, as well as to prospect so that we can find water and food. Whether for reasons of evolutionary adaptation or pragmatism, people gravitate toward “prospect and refuge” landscapes. They seek them out in real life, and they like them even once removed, in landscape paintings by J. M. W. Turner, Albert Bierstadt, and Sunday painters; in photographs by Ansel Adams and a thousand commercial studios. Exposing people even to representations of natural landscapes improves people’s physical and mental health. So if your doctor or your boss can’t cut a window through the office wall, then hanging a picture of nature or getting furniture with biomorphic forms and natural materials helps more than doing nothing at all.
Managing Human Experience through Form-Making: Louis Kahn’s “Deep Reverence for the Nature of Nature” at the Salk Institute
Of course embracing a site’s greenery, topography, and light, and eliciting “prospect and refuge” behavior entails more than cutting skylights in ceilings and plunking down potted plants in corridors. To explore the range of ways that the natural world can inform a project’s design, we can visit one of modern architecture’s greatest and most beloved icons, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, by Louis Kahn. Jonas Salk, the client for the eponymously named institute and the developer of the polio vaccine, believed that major breakthroughs in scientific research necessitated both the rigor of scientific method and the freedom of creativity, and he worked closely with Kahn to bring to fruition a complex of research laboratories and private offices sited on the crest of a sandy cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The Salk Institute (altered in 1996 by a much-needed, though grievously banal, addition) deliberately appeals to people’s inherent biophilia in obvious and less than obvious ways. Kahn gracefully integrated the complex into the existing site and invoked schemas of “prospect and refuge,” introducing different aspects of our human connection to nature—our human nature—in carefully sequenced stages. The result is an enthralling architectural experience which synthesizes moment-by-moment experience with evocations of nature’s enduring infinitude.
We come upon the Salk Institute in one of two possible ways: from the south (an approach mirrored on the north, but rarely used) and from the east. From the south, our first glimpse of the building, across a grassy knoll, presents a blank concrete monolith of a wall, punctuated by four projecting concrete prisms, each housing the deep shadow of a small entrance. It’s a bit like stumbling upon the walls of a medieval fort, simultaneously forbidding and intriguing. We cannot but wonder what’s behind that wall. Can I go there? What would I see if I did?
What’s behind that concrete monolith of a wall? South facade, Salk Institute for Biological Studies (Louis Kahn), La Jolla, California. Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Hisorical and Museum Commission.
If we had approached the original, pre-addition Salk Institute from the east instead, we’d start in the parking lot located off the busy Torrey Pines Road. Our first glimpse of the complex was through the foliated screen of a grove of eucalyptus trees (since cut down to make way for the addition), a buffer zone between the multilane road we’ve just left and the institute proper. Already, as we emerged from our car, we had entered nature’s world, with the building discernible only by the edges of its symmetrically receding blocks. As in the south approach, from this first glimpse we deduce that this is no ordinary building. Instead of the conventional building-site formula—large object plunked on ground—the architecture here is merely a three-dimensional frame, its seeming function to introduce the stunning infinitude of the Pacific Ocean and its sky. Nature’s awe-inspiring presence commands our attention. The symmetry of the two laboratory blocks serves the same function as the A:B:A:B pattern on the south facade: architecture quietly reassures us of human presence. The Salk’s restrained, symmetrically placed laboratories are slung low, hugging the cliff, framing the horizon, so that wherever we start from, nature dominates. These buildings do not stamp their feet and wave their arms; no “look at me!” moments here. Instead, the relationship of the site to the size, simple volumes, and restrained materials of the buildings beckons us to prospect, to explore.
Kahn designed the Salk Institute with “a deep reverence for the nature of nature”: view from Pacific Ocean, Salk Institute. © Ezra Stoller/Esto.
Original east entrance through screen of eucalyptus trees, Salk Institute. © Ezra Stoller/Esto.
These initial views of the original Salk Institute offer up easily comprehensible images and patterns because they are attuned to the mechanisms and—especially—the limitations of human visual cognition. The visual field in which human eyes perceive things as sharply etched, called the fovea, constitutes a mere two degrees in extent, a region so tiny that it can be completely obscured by your thumbnail if you hold it approximately fourteen inches from your eye. Because our face and feet are oriented in a direction we call “forward,” to see what’s behind or even at a sixty-degree angle from that focal point in front of us, we must turn our heads, our bodies, or both. Outside that two-degree cone, the resolution of our vision becomes astonishingly poor, though you may not be aware of this because your brain, using details gleaned from rapid scanning and based on memories of past scenes, supplies information to fill in the details your eye fails to capture. At any moment, much of what a person thinks he sees of the world in his peripheral vision—patterns, rhythms, and general compositional elements—is little more than an imaginative filling in of the blanks with the wonders of meaning derived from fleeting glances. As a result, human sight excels at rapid gist extraction, our efficient ability to extract essential visual information from our environments so quickly (twenty milliseconds) that the speed is literally within the blink of an eye, and when we do extract a scene’s gist, we are rewarded with a little jolt of neurotransmitters that give us a sense of pleasure. The Salk complex defers to its duneside site while conveying a sense of order that is obviously human-made through the repetition of its simple rectangular volumes on the south and north facades, and through the symmetry of the laboratory blocks on the east facade. By designing the complex to both meld into the site and create a sense of mystery as to its identity, Kahn skillfully manages our initial emotional response to this place. It is as though he is saying directly to us, Forget the road. Here, you enter an oceanside refuge, what he called “a world within a world.”
Even as we catch sight of the Salk Institute’s centrally placed plaza, it’s not the forms of the architecture that command our attention. In the symmetrically arranged pair of light gray concrete volumes, Kahn minimizes the distractions that interrupt the sweep of our eyes toward the visual center of the composition, the Pacific’s glistening horizon. Distracting views of staircases, windows, corridors, doors—ordinary architectural indicators of human presence and movement—are mostly suppressed. These approaches insist upon the architecture’s unobtrusiveness, as Kahn doggedly designs our attention away from the buildings, redirecting our gaze on to the light-drenched, windswept site, to the dark horizontal line of the Pacific, to the clean grandeur of La Jolla’s blue skies.
Directing our eyes to the horizon and minimizing distractions: Central plaza with fountain, Salk Institute. John Nicolais Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania. Photo by John Nicolais, March 1979.
Humans are wired to scan for changes and anomalies in their immediate environment. Kahn breaks the quietude of our initial ingress, at first, with the sound: water gurgles into the channel embedded into the plaza’s travertine pavement, with the fountain that feeds it emitting far more noise than its small size might suggest. Time seems arrested in everything except the splashing of water from a spigot that we cannot see. The channel fountain, which recalls those at the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, and in Indian Mughal mausoleum-gardens, measures only slightly wider than a human foot. Our auditory and proprioceptive faculties are put on alert: hearing the water’s gushing, intrigued by this watery “line of light,” we are determined to enter the plaza immediately. Is that water in the channel moving? Is it cold? Will my foot fit in? Kahn designed these approach sequences to slow us down and help train our focus on the substantive essence of the Salk Institute’s mission: biological research, which is nothing less than an inquiry into the profound mysteries of nature. This he does by skillfully managing our visual, auditory, and proprioceptive cognitions to repeatedly redirect our attention to the site’s natural surroundings—the eucalyptus trees, the crest side view of the ocean, the warm sunlight reflecting off the white, empty travertine. That’s why Kahn, when speaking to an audience, told them that he had designed the Salk Institute “out of a deep reverence for the nature of nature. Built into us,” he continued, “is a reverence for the elements, for water, for light, for air—a deep reverence for the animal world and the natural world.”
Human bodies and minds evolved also with some elemental forms drawn from nature that are not embedded in specific geographies of place. This includes certain essential shapes and compositional patterns, their interplay with earthbound materials, and the effects of gravity on them. When people encounter a building, cityscape, or landscape, rapid gist extraction helps us to create a mental image of a scene’s rough organization—“rough” because our perception cannot offer a precise account of what’s on the ground. Our mental representations of our environs are only as accurate as we need them to be. Pattern, coherence, regularity, and contrast prevail over accuracy and precision; schemas and mental representations fill in the rest. Because of the human eye’s limitations (especially in comparison with other animals), the way people see might better be described, writes one psychologist, as “solving ill-posed problems by adding assumptions about the world.”
Scanning the Salk Institute, we rely on form-based cues such as edges, angles, corners, contours, and curves, testing them against an internalized storehouse of basic compositional patterns and volumes. (One of these patterns is the reassuringly predictable bilateral symmetry, which guides the overall arrangement of the Salk’s structures when approached from the east, and which we discuss further in chapter 6.) The largest and simplest set of compositional schemas is grounded in a storehouse of basic figures known as geons. Geons, in the words of the vision scientist who discovered them, Irving Biederman, are “viewpoint-invariant,” meaning that we discern their forms, individually and in combination, regardless of where we physically position ourselves in relation to them. That’s why we don’t need to change our position relative to one of the Salk’s exterior laboratory staircases to know that it, and all the others, are rectangular prisms with parallel planes and edges.
Some geons and their variants.
We identify geons using their edge configurations—straight or curved, parallel or intersecting. Fewer than forty figures compose the full set of our internal storehouse of geonic figures, the irreducible elements of what Biederman calls our “recognition by component” way of seeing. Given the complexity of our visual world, forty may not sound like a lot. But because each geon has several variants and can be joined to any other, at any scale and in any combination, forty or so geons suffice to help us make sense of nearly everything in our visual world: any pair of geons can be combined to create over 10 million possible shapes; any three geon variants make over 300 billion possible shapes, and so on. Geons facilitate our rapid comprehension of the myriad form-based cues that the world throws our way—even if, in actual experience, some creations make geons easier to identify than others.
The universality of this shared mental storehouse rests in the regularity of geonic forms owing to their configuration by atomic forces and gravity. Geonic shapes abide by the principles of the physics of matter. Rectangular prisms, for example, pervade the material world because to make a volume stable, we must do nothing more than place planes and edges parallel or perpendicular to one another. Even not formally educated, indigenous children living in the Amazon, isolated from other communities, understand these basic geometric principles—indeed, they understand them just as well as most middle schoolers in the United States. Just through our interactions with the objects of the world, our internalized storehouse of geons gets reinforced and confirmed. Touching, even just seeing an object—a ball, a book, a teakettle—is enough for us to infer its overall shape, and then apply that inference to the visual stimulus that is actually before us. In short, our cognitive reliance on geons suggests that the Platonic solids and principles of Euclidean geometry in the built world resonate with the frameworks our visual systems employ to help us see.
Identifying geons: prisms and pyramids (compare with Heydar Aliyev): Ypenburg Housing (MVRDV), the Hague, Netherlands. © Brian Rose.
Searching for geons (compare with Ypenburg Housing): Heydar Aliyev (Zaha Hadid), Baku. Photo: Iwan Baan.
Managing Human Emotions through Materials, Textures, and Details
In the next part of our sequence into the Salk Institute, namely our longer exploration of its central plaza, Kahn lets the spectacle of nature’s monumentality fade away. He mainly leaves behind the obvious use of reassuringly simple geonic forms and the geographically contingent elements of nature—greenery, topography, light—to orchestrate a more conventionally architectural experience. For the buildings of the central plaza, laboratories introduced by the staircase-office blocks, Kahn focuses the design around surface materials and their interaction with gravity. He deploys these elemental features of the natural world to ensnare us into an engaged, indeed interactive physical relationship with these buildings and—by extension—with the institution they embody and house.
To return to our path into the Salk’s central plaza: having inferred enough from what we’ve seen to identify where we should go next, we make our way into the plaza’s center. As we do so, the importance of the site’s topography and the overall composition of the buildings diminishes. Increasingly, its materials and surface details command our attention. We’ve seen that geons are one of the principal means by which we comprehend forms. When our brain identifies a scene and discerns its form-based cues, such as shapes and their orientation, the sizes and combinations of its geons, that analysis runs through our parietal lobe, which has the primary responsibility for integrating sensory information from various parts of our body and is where the homunculus is located. This pathway suggests that to understand form-based cues we need not refer to our memories of past experiences with similar forms.
How the brain analyzes the cues it gleans from surfaces is different. In order for us to make sense of surface-based cues such as texture, density, color, pattern, and so on, our visual impressions are primarily processed through a pathway that involves the medial temporal lobe and the hippocampus, necessitating that—in contrast to form-perception—we call up our memories of prior experiences with similar surfaces. Such memories will draw up a lot of other varied information, not only from vision but also from our emotions and from other sensory faculties—tactile sensations, smells, sounds, and more. Our responses to surfaces, consequently, are more likely to powerfully contribute to our holistic experience of place than our responses to forms. In short: form has wrongly been crowned king, because form-based cues elicit less of a whole-body, intersensory, and emotional response than surface-based cues do. Surfaces we experience emotionally and palpably. And in our societal discussions of the built environment, surfaces and materials are often not a major theme; in its construction, rich and enlivening materials are deemed a luxury, often “value-engineered” out of existence.
Materials, patterns, textures, and colors shape our lasting impressions of a place as profoundly as does its overall formal organization and composition. Listen, now, to Richard Neutra, who designed some of the twentieth century’s most richly elegant steel-and-glass residences. Describing the surfaces he recalled from his childhood, Neutra confessed, “Strange as it may seem, my first impressions of architecture were largely gustatory. I licked the blotter-like wallpaper adjoining my bed pillow, and the polished brass hardware of my toy cupboard. It must have been there and then that I developed an unconscious preference for flawlessly smooth surfaces that would stand the tongue test, the most exacting of tactile investigations.”
Neutra’s early mentor and employer, Frank Lloyd Wright, also concentrated much of his design energies on surface-based cues. Often he coupled highly textured surfaces with smooth ones—most famously, in the living room at Fallingwater in Bear Run, Pennsylvania. Wright sometimes used hand-hewn and natural materials and textures to stimulate not only our visual and tactile systems but also our proprioceptive system. In his design for the majestic Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, he paved the pathways outside the entrance with unpolished lava stones that were native to the region so that guests approaching the hotel needed to pay attention to the walkway’s uneven surfaces. As Wright ushered guests toward and eventually into the hotel lobby, he made sure that the lava stones were polished to progressively higher states of finish, so that by the time a guest reached the front desk, she tread on smooth, well-polished surfaces. The Imperial Hotel’s guests may or may not have consciously registered this subtle variation in the surface paving, but many probably reached the registration desk with a palpable sense of relief. Now I can relax.
Richly textured materials and surfaces—like the lava stones at Wright’s Imperial Hotel, or the Salk Institute’s travertine, concrete, and teak—elbow their way into our peripersonal universe by eliciting multisensory, emotionally rich nonconscious and conscious cognitions. Take the teak panels in the Salk’s staircase-office blocks. People like wood. They are drawn to it for countless reasons. In comparison with metal, wood maintains a fairly constant temperature. Coloristically, wood skews warm, in hues of reddish-orange browns, a palette people tend to find appealing and subtly stimulating. Wood’s grain exhibits an appealing tension of pattern and irregularity. Because wood commonly appears in residential architecture, it simultaneously elicits associations of nature on the one hand, and domesticity on the other. Travertine also elicits a rich associative trove, echoing some of what we glean from wood (nature, incident, texture) while also evoking an almost pathos-filled coupling of hard permanence with porous fragility and the creamy, rich, pockmarked stone of ancient Rome.
When a building’s surfaces advertise the traces of their construction, they elicit our palpable, intersensory engagement in another way as well: by offering us opportunities to mentally simulate the process of their making. We saw this dynamic in the hand-dressed stone surfaces of Neutelings Riedijk’s Museum at the Stream in Antwerp. Neutra, pondering his own reactions to the surfaces of handmade objects, explained its mechanism. He wrote: “Viewing hand-formed pottery, or the lines of a draftsman, or the lettering of a calligraphist, we unconsciously identify ourselves with their makers: We seem to follow vicariously the imagined muscular exertion in the nervous experience of the craftsman, as if experiencing it ourselves.” Neutra’s hypothesis, developed decades before the research tools were available to substantiate it, has been all but confirmed by the discovery of the brain’s system of canonical neurons and mirror neurons.
Canonical neurons control motor actions; located in the brain’s frontal and parietal lobes, they fire when we are doing something such as hand-building or throwing a clay pot, and they also fire when we do nothing more than look at an inanimate object, like a lump of clay, that we imagine ourselves manipulating with a goal in mind. Mirror neurons (also located in the frontal and parietal lobes) also fire when we execute a given action such as sculpting clay and when we mentally simulate that action; they also fire when we observe someone else executing that action. The brain’s canonical and mirror neuron mechanisms indicate that in our experience of built environments, obviously human-made surfaces as well as manipulable objects really do prompt us to simulate the process by which they were crafted.
The operations of canonical and mirror neurons help to explain the visceral power of our responses to both form and surface-based cues. When we look at an object with which we might potentially engage or mentally prepare to undertake a given action, such as opening a window or ascending a flight of stairs, canonical neurons fire. Mirror neurons fire not only when we prepare to open a window or walk upstairs, but—amazingly—when we merely watch another person performing such an action, as though, in order to understand what that person intends to do, we imagine ourselves performing the same act. So these neurons “mirror” the actions of the person we observe. The discovery of the canonical and mirror neuron mechanisms supports the emerging cognitive neuroscientific view that the human motor system may not be distinct from our sensory faculties, and that they may be two components in a single, unified system. Perception is never passive. Perception is perception for action.
If we pay attention to any object or element—a staircase, a ramp—which we associate with a given action—ascending a staircase step by step or pacing up a ramp—our mirror and canonical neurons can fire. This, in addition to the visual dynamism of combining diagonals with spiraling lines, explains why we see Le Corbusier’s famous coupling of a staircase and a ramp in the Villa Savoye as so dynamic. Looking at these two means of ascent or descent, we might nonconsciously feel a faint sense of activation in our legs and torso.
Scientists also continue to unearth our complex psychological and neurological responses to surface-based cues such as materials, textures, colors, pliability, and density. Exploring the canonical and mirror neuron responses to textures and materials is a rich area for future research. In the meantime, we already have a trove of studies illustrating the psychological power of our responses to surface-based cues. One we discussed earlier: students participate more in group discussions if cushioned furniture, throw pillows, and rugs bedeck their classroom. Studies in social cognition, which probe the judgments that people make about others and the decisions that they make about their own conduct, yield surprising results. For example, when a person holds a hot cup of coffee, he will be more likely to assess a stranger as generous and friendly than if he holds a glass of iced coffee. A student will be a tougher negotiator seated in a hard-surfaced chair than in a cushioned chair. Meet a new person while touching a rough texture and you’re more likely to recall the exchange as “rough”; meet someone while holding a hard object and you’d be likelier to perceive her as “rigid.” Such data suggest that people metaphorically extend the schemas they construct of experiences with surfaces—we see a rough texture and know that it will feel rough on our fingertips—into arenas of our lives that fall far from the embodied experiences in which they originate.
Perception is perception for action: two means of ascent at the Villa Savoye (Le Corbusier), Poissy, France. akg-images/L. M. Peter.
Surfaces and forms come together, of course, and one aspect of a surface that integrally relates to the form it envelops is its shaping by the forces of gravity and the physics of matter. Mostly by living on the earth we understand gravity’s basic principles. We can infer the approximate trajectory of a baseball once the batter hits it in the air. We know that standing on a vertical axis perpendicular to a flat plane will hold us steady, and that if we compare our relatively unencumbered heads “up there” to the load-bearing, spreading feet “down there,” we will feel in our bodies the compressive forces of gravity moving downward. Similarly, we understand and even feel what we see when a designer articulates the force of gravity on his building, as did the designer of Mohammed Shah’s proud tomb, and as Daniel Burnham did in the flaring base, with six-foot-thick walls, of his seventeen-story Monadnock Building in Chicago. A certain unease—or to put positively, dynamism—results too when the forces of gravity are contravened: Niemeyer deliberately challenges us in his unbuilt Museum of Modern Art in Caracas by inverting a pyramid to perch it atop a rocky cliff.
As humans grow from infancy to adulthood, we acquire and internalize a basic knowledge of the essential principles of gravity and the physics of matter. Such understanding helps us to know—sometimes without even knowing that we know—that two like-sized objects can differ in weight and would require different levels of physical exertion to move them. Embodied knowledge helps us intuit that a heavy object suspended above us, such as part of a sculpture or a building, might fall, potentially on us. People acquire a vast body of knowledge simply by living embodied in the world, as an object among objects, and as matter in space.
Teasing gravity: unbuilt project for the Museum of Modern Art (Oscar Niemeyer), Caracas, Venezuela.
Taunting gravity: cantilever at CCTV Headquarters (Rem Koolhaas/Office of Metropolitan Architecture), Beijing, China. Nikolas Koenig/OTTO.
Perception for Action: Surfaces Activate Imagination
When we left off our approach to the Salk Institute, our ears were attuned to the gurgling water feeding its fountain. Ever attuned to changes in the surroundings, we instantly turn our attentions to the movement and sound of the channel fountain’s water. As we make our way into the plaza proper, the water piques our curiosity; from there, Kahn orchestrates a composition that draws us in and encourages us to explore it. The plaza’s linear channel of water that stretches toward the horizon reads not as a line on a plane, some abstract geometric composition, but as a vehicle bearing embodied meaning. In our human experience of space, lines mark paths, define boundaries, and articulate the edges within and between objects, materials, and spaces. Our eyes follow the path of this watery trough—which the scientists who work at the Salk call the “line of light,” aptly capturing the channel fountain’s dynamism, its glistening flow—to the vanishing point in the Pacific’s horizon; immediately thereafter, we imagine our feet pacing out that path, walking alongside its line, heeding its directional call. Finally, our feet follow the path that our eyes staked out. So just the sight of this channel fountain initiates a succession of responses that encapsulate how we come to “feel” experiences in our physical surroundings. Our nonconscious perceptions and sensory faculties work together, intersensorily, and these all collaborate with our imagined motor responses. Little wonder that the artist Paul Klee described the act of making a drawing as “taking a line for a walk.”
To reach the center of the plaza, we must descend several steps so shallow that we might barely register their existence, especially as we are focusing instead on other visible and audible enticements. At the steps’ terminus, a bench running nearly the entire width of the plaza impedes our forward progress; to circumambulate it we must deflect our axis, which in turn shifts our perspective of the adjacent office-tower blocks. Now we see them at an oblique angle. Quite suddenly, our mental image of this entire complex—a static, symmetrical arrangement of geonic prisms framing the horizon—disassembles before our scanning eyes. Those initially blank, monolithic concrete prisms pull apart, open up. Now the facades break into a porous rhythm of shadowed apertures and lightly incised planes. More: rather than sitting heavily on the ground, the staircase-office blocks seem perched lightly on top of it.
The walls of these staircase-office blocks resemble post-and-lintel structures that contain small private offices arrayed around an open-air dogleg staircase. Initially the Salk complex laboratories seemed like heavy, load-bearing monoliths slung low along the coastline; now those same buildings present as vertically oriented blocks, rising tall. In contrast to the complex’s initially symmetrical, easily apprehended arrangement, now the floors of these towers stack in irregular dimensions. A tall bottom floor supports two shorter intermediate floors. An especially stretched top story caps the composition, its extra heft and height seeming to press these staircase-office blocks down, anchoring them into the ground. The stretched top story serves a function similar to the capital on a column, or a pediment atop a frieze.
In the staircase-office blocks, an intricate light-dark, plane-void pattern plays out in a rich concatentation of materials and subtly constructed details. Complementing the travertine’s pockmarked, red-veined creamy yellow is the velvet smooth bluish-gray concrete of the staircase-office towers, inset with ranges of silvery weathered teak slats. The more we explore and reflect on where we’ve been and are now, the more complex these distinctive, half-inside, half-outside tower blocks become.
What has Kahn done and why? In contrast to the approach sequence, where he insistently deflected our attention away from the buildings and back onto nature’s beauty, now Kahn manages forms, surfaces, and materials to emphatically keep our attention trained on these human-scaled buildings, which now seem so at odds with the wildness of this natural site. The channel fountain measures just wide enough to comfortably fit a foot. The staircases with their low risers match the step by step of the human body in leisurely motion. Banishing the long internal corridors that are the bane of large institutional and residential buildings everywhere, disaggregating staircases from pathways, Kahn graciously offers up human-scaled sequences and spatial eddies, inviting us to linger and explore. Blackboards on landings signal us to pick up chalk and draw. The private offices are scaled to the size of a standing person; they envelop us in oak paneling that bespeaks domesticity. The carefully laid teak slats on the offices’ exteriors betray the art of human making, and the simple, repetitive rhythm of the slats’ linear arrangement accentuates the irregular whorl of the wood’s grain. All these textural impressions activate and enliven our sense of touch.
A sudden attentional shift, from nature to culture: standing in the Salk Institute’s central plaza, staircase-office blocks. Photo: Iwan Baan.
Kahn models even the exposed concrete—a notoriously unloved building material—into a luxuriously smooth surface, and the means of its making offered him the possibility of furthering our identification with the building. Detailing the poured-concrete panels, he told construction workers to sculpt the aggregate that oozed out from between the wooden formwork panels into raised V joints that mark the trace of the construction of the building.
“A building is a struggle, not a miracle. The architecture should acknowledge this”: detail of concrete V joints, Salk Institute. © Ezra Stoller/Esto.
It’s a tiny move, like barely visible pencil marks left behind on a finished painting. But just as Neutra describes, it evokes precisely our mental simulation of how that handmade object came to be. Such small details produce large experiential effects precisely because surface-based cues can ensnare us into an intersensory, bodily engagement with the building, and take advantage of our proclivity to mentally simulate a process as a means of understanding an object. “A building is a struggle, not a miracle,” Kahn once sighed. “The architecture should acknowledge this.”
The smoothly polished concrete. The crafted construction details. The hewn wooden slats. The travertine pavers meticulously laid to expose shadow joints. The precisely dimensioned proportions conveying the building’s weight and termination. Carefully executed, all these surface-based cues and indicators of the interplay of materials, gravity, and light enmesh us and the people we see and imagine here, in this and only this place, in a richly constructed moment that engages so many of our senses. Kahn composed the overall forms of the Salk Institute to establish its and our connection to nature, the world, and the subject of biological research. Then he designed the complex’s materials and surfaces to pull the thread of nature into and through a world suffused with the grace and presence of humanity.
A Humanistic Bureaucracy: Alvar Aalto’s Synthesis of Nature and Culture in the National Pensions Institute
Abiding by the tenets of experiential design can happen anywhere, not just in places as stunningly distinctive as La Jolla’s dramatic coastline: it can improve any kind of project and can be employed to create different kinds of effects. Alvar Aalto, a contemporary of Kahn’s, is the author of many such projects, mainly in Europe, and some of his most famous buildings, including the celebrated Säynätsalo Town Hall and the Church of the Three Crosses in Imatra, both in his native Finland, continue to influence contemporary designers. Aalto’s National Pensions Institute (NPI) in Helsinki, the headquarters of Finland’s social security administration, is neither his best-known nor his most dramatic project. Yet in its understated way, the NPI is an arcadia of earthbound light and serenity, illustrating the transformative power of experientially informed design, whereby even the ostensibly banal can be made into a special place.
Occupying a block-sized site in a residential neighborhood north of downtown Helsinki, the NPI, at first glance, smacks of a thousand ribbon-windowed, developer-built, suburban office complexes in the United States. But pictures suggest a misleading banality. Experiencing the NPI in person reveals that something as ordinary as a governmental office building, which could have been a body-and-soul-deadening workplace, can be a human-centered oasis that stimulates the imagination and enhances well-being.
National Pensions Institute (Alvar Aalto), Helsinki, Finland: entrance is to left of the front bl0ck: Photo by Heikki Havas, Alvar Aalto Museum. Circa 1957.
Suburban office building, United States. © Anton Grassl/Esto.
Disaggregated volumes mitigate scale, National Pensions Institute. Photo by Hekki Havas, Alvar Aalto Museum 1957.
To balance the neighborhood’s residential scale with a pensions office large enough to serve the entire Finnish population, which, upon opening, employed eight hundred people and includes offices, storage, meeting halls, a library, and a cafeteria, Aalto adopted a deliberately non-iconic approach. Linked rectangular prisms hug the perimeter of the sloping triangular site, and these disaggregated large volumes mitigate the building’s large scale. Each prism differs in some way from the ones adjoining it, offering some indication of the functions it contains: a tall, vertical, tile-faced tower houses the elevator bank and staircases, while blank, brick-faced blocks hold the storage spaces.
Red rock, red brick: National Pensions Institute (detail, near entrance). Sarah Williams Goldhagen.
Finland, one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries, is also one of its northernmost. Nature looms large. Aalto integrates the enormous NPI into its red-rocked, sloping site not only by parsing its functions into seemingly discrete volumes but also by pairing the site’s exposed rock with unevenly shaped bricks in deep reds and blackish browns. An earthy, textural palette of materials clads most of the building’s prisms; complementing these are partially dressed green-gray granite blocks, edged with copper flashing that weathered long ago to an acid green. The NPI outsizes its neighbors without overpowering them; it seems of a piece with the land on which it sits. The substantial entrance block, approached from the north, opens into the large multistory main meeting hall, where people confer with state employees about their pension accounts. Smaller meeting rooms and offices occupy adjacent blocks. At the northeast end of the site, the NPI’s exterior facades create a mostly enclosed courtyard composed of two linked, beautifully planted outdoor garden “rooms” accessible from both an adjacent public park and the agency’s cafeteria.
Deft planning, a deceptively modest formal composition, and texturally evocative materials knit the NPI into the craggy topography of its site. Its highly textured, variegated natural materials elicit the response of all our senses, while its easily apprehensible but varied forms excite our curiosity. Inside the building and in the main public spaces, Aalto continues these themes and layers into them salient embodied schemas and metaphors that reinforce the project’s themes: a gentle democracy nurtures citizens modest enough to coexist with the natural world.
Courtyard with garden, National Pensions Institute. Photo: Maija Holma, Alvar Aalto Museum. 1997.
As we approach the main, north facade, a large brick-clad rectangular prism is immediately, nonconsciously apprehensible: a geon. But when we search for the entrance, what at first appeared as a symmetrical volume of contained space reveals itself to be neither fully enclosed nor compositionally symmetrical. Outdoor terraces at the roof line and the entry level break the regularity of the box. Entering the building requires that we ascend a staircase located off-axis from the symmetrical facade’s midpoint, slid between a dramatic rock outcropping and a covered terrace: deliberately, Aalto makes us walk a path between nature and culture. It’s an entry sequence that illustrates how even this large governmental institution abides by nature’s dictates.
Inside, Aalto integrates the elements and features of the natural world literally, schematically, and metaphorically. Daylight reaches even difficult-to-access places, sculpting and eliciting different atmospheres from space to space. In the brightly lit main meeting hall, the triple height ceiling zigzags up and down in a double range of steeply sloping windows stretching upward, as if they were glassy mountain peaks reaching for the light of the sky. Between the two sets of skylights, hanging cylindrical light canisters punctuate the angular rhythm and, on dark days, boost illumination into the large room. In the NPI’s two-level library, elsewhere in the building, circular light wells sculpted into the deep ceiling cast more evenly filtered natural light, suited for reading: as in his Town Library in Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia), Aalto had calculated the depth of these evenly spaced light wells to catch the Finnish sun’s wan rays even in midwinter.
Double-tier skylights, National Pensions Institute. Photo: Richard Peters, Alvar Aalto Museum. 1970s.
Baton tiles (interior) National Pensions Institute. Photo: Maija Holma, Alvar Aalto Museum. 1997.
In any very large, multistory building, creating dynamic internal corridors and illuminating them properly presents one of design’s thornier problems. Aalto widened the NPI’s internal corridors and whenever possible threaded them through places in the building where they could catch the rays of daylight from exterior windows. Like Kahn, and as he himself did in most of his other projects, Aalto also lavishly attended to the NPI’s interior surfaces. Corridor walls are clad with long, thin shiny white-and-blue-enameled tiles, flat ranges punctuated with linear ranges of curved, protruding “baton tiles.” These linear elements bulk up the building’s corridors and pull us along our path, and as they do so, they facilitate wayfinding. And most of all, the baton tiles invite perception as action, practically pulling us toward them so that we might run our hand along them as we walk, feeling their coolness, delighting in how the bump, bump, bump on our hand registers our progress through space.
Inside and out, with these and other design moves and material details, Aalto calls upon our embodied experience of nature in what seems, at first blush, a most ordinary building. As the comparison with the ostensibly similar (in reality witheringly different) suburban office block shows, harmonizing a built environment with our human embodiment in the natural world takes more than the determination to do so. It takes an awareness of human perceptual subtleties, along with the creativity to appropriately accommodate them.
Situating Constructed Environments in Nature in the Twenty-First Century
Today our built environments must rise to the interrelated challenges of hyper-urbanization, globalization, and climate change, making the imperative to take our embodied experience of the natural world into account that much more pressing. But the task need not be any more difficult than it was in 1956, when Aalto completed the NPI, nor more expensive. Consider, for example, Diébédo Francis Kéré’s Primary School in Gando, a remote village in southeast Burkina Faso that to this day contains no running water or electricity. Kéré was well familiar with the region’s climate and customs, having been born to the village chief of Gando, where he lived until he was seven years old. Beginning with the region’s vernacular traditions, Kéré selected common materials, mud and corrugated metal. But then he modified existing construction practices to fabricate a clay/mud hybrid brick that proved extremely durable while providing superior thermal insulation and he trained local residents to make them, effectively jump-starting an industry in one of the world’s most impoverished areas. He also decided to abide by the common practice of using corrugated metal for the school’s roof, but made a simple but dramatic improvement on local construction traditions by raising the roof above the supporting walls. This provided superior ventilation in Gando’s searing hot climate and created large overhangs that shade and protect the surfaces of the exterior walls. The result of this budget design? An affordable, elegant learning environment, deeply situated in nature and connected to place.
Accommodating climates and building cultures: Primary School (Diébédo Francis Kéré), Gando, Burkina Faso. © Grant Smith/VIEW.
Built environments that situate us in our bodies and the natural world can happen not only in marquee buildings or in the regulatory freedom of the developing world. They can happen almost anywhere. This includes even the most challenging building typologies, such as high-rise developments. Some people, including some theorists of architectural experience such as Christopher Alexander, continue to insist that tall buildings are intrinsically antithetical to humane domiciles. But that position is resoundingly belied in the human-scale, nature-rich residential and mixed-use projects in cities by Stefano Boeri in Milan, Singapore-based WOHA Architects, and Cambridge, Massachusetts–based Safdie Architects. In Boeri’s “Vertical Forest” in Milan, a green project, the equivalent of 500,000 square feet of single-family dwellings is packed into two tall residential towers, one 360 feet and the other 250 feet tall. Over 900 trees and many thousands of plants are arranged, differing from facade to facade according to its orientation to the sun, creating green-filled homes for its residents while reducing carbon emissions, cleaning the city air, and promoting a biodiverse microclimate right smack in a dense area of downtown Milan.
In hyperdense Singapore, WOHA also demonstrates the possibilities of sustainability and design excellence with their two tall residential buildings, Newton Suites and 1 Moulmein Rise. Both largely eschew artificial climate control, relying instead on design to intensify natural ventilation and cooling. The towers are oriented to capture prevailing breezes, and they use modular window-shading devices, balconies, and green walls for cooling and ventilation. These climate-control elements simultaneously establish a body-centered scale and create, from the simple visual language of repetition and variation, an appealingly abstract pattern. In Newton Suites, closely spaced, horizontal shelves of black perforated metal cool the building’s surfaces and reduce energy costs. These alternate with two differently patterned vertical ranges of U-shaped concrete balconies, one in a simple repeating pattern, the other arranged in a complex A:B:B:B:A rhythm. All this is surrounded by lush planting and green walls that run the entire vertical height of the facade. Both buildings, when viewed from the surrounding neighborhoods, strike a dignified profile. Moshe Safdie began exploring how to integrate nature into dense urban areas decades ago, in both extensive writings and in his famous Habitat dwellings, of which one version was constructed in Montreal for Expo 67. Recently he began a series of projects updating the Habitat concept; one is his middle-class Golden Dream Bay development in Qinhuangdao, China, in which fifteen-story terraced buildings are stacked atop another at right angles, creating twenty-story-tall framed openings. This open-web, terraced arrangement directs prevailing breezes into and through the apartment units, and maintains views for city dwellers of the Bohai Sea. Just these few examples demonstrate the ways that contemporary designers can integrate our situatedness in our bodies and in the natural world into even today’s complex, ever-urbanizing, and global world.
High-rise nature: Vertical Forest (Stefano Boeri), Milan, Italy. Photography © Davide Piras/Courtesy of Boeri Studio.
Tall buildings in warm climates: Newton Suites (WOHA Architects), Singapore. Photography by Patrick Bingham-Hall.
Qinhuangdao Habitat (Moshe Safdie), China. Photography by Tim Franco and courtesy Safdie Architects.
Human experience, including its nonconscious and conscious cognitions, is situated in three dimensions. So far we have discussed two, the human body and the natural world, each of which is a product of evolution. The third dimension, the social world, is less tethered to the dictates of our biological evolution in physical bodies inhabiting a physical world. Humans are also decidedly social beings. The individual and social worlds that we inherit and create are strongly influenced by the places where our engagements and interactions transpire. Places situate us as individuals among others, and places help us become and sustain ourselves as members of the many overlapping social groups through which we live our lives.