Why nature should serve as a model for built environments.
"In a short time something important happens to all kinds of people in natural places," says psychologist Stephen Kaplan who, with his wife Rachel, has spent more than two decades studying the effects of natural environments on human preferences and behaviors. Their work provides important insights into how and why our interactions with nature produce some of life's most compelling and satisfying experiences. Based upon the Kaplans' work and additional scientific research into the relationships between humans and natural environments, the "need for nature" premise proposes to unravel the mystery of why this ephemeral "something important" happens in natural places and discover what implications this knowledge holds for both the design of our expanding built environments and for the preservation of natural environments.
Central to the need for nature premise are what architect William McDonough calls "certain fundamental laws that are inherent to the natural world that we can use as models and mentors for human designs." This premise is a framework for analysis using these fundamental laws to study the characteristics of nature that contribute to our overall well-being. And it serves as a conceptual model in which these characteristics can be interpreted and developed into a working model for the design of built environments.
The premise also is a proposition that we recognize the other value of nature -- the value that extends far beyond its material, economical or recreational uses. It proposes that we value the natural environment as the unique source of numerous physical and psychological benefits providing experiences essential to our survival, development and quality of life.
Common Preferences
Research attempting to identify characteristics of natural environments that humans innately prefer reveal intriguing patterns and similarities shedding new light upon the eternal design question, "What do people need and want from their environments?" In their 1989 book The Experience of Nature, the Kaplans explore how our preferences for certain natural settings are formed and examine the benefits and satisfactions gained from environments containing preferred characteristics. Across geographical distances and culture differences they find "strong and pervasive consistencies in the way people interpret the environment and in their preferences."
The Kaplans' research indicated we prefer surroundings that provide a wide range of information, both real and symbolic, with a chance to explore and "expand our horizons." Often, we want something in our surroundings to challenge us -- not pose a significant risk or threat -- but rather offer an opportunity to use certain skills successfully. And we like mystery; a quality the Kaplans say draws us in with "the promise that one could learn more." Preference for our environments, they conclude, tends to focus upon what we can learn and the safety with which we can learn it.
Independent studies overwhelmingly illustrate that when it comes to what we need and want from our environments, it is all about survival. What we have always needed from our environments -- survival advantage -- is what we have always wanted from our environments as well. It still is. The biophilia hypothesis, which holds that we have an innate, hereditary need to experience and affiliate with the natural world, suggests that these fundamental needs and wants are still as much a part of our deep survival instincts as the "fight or flight" response or the need to "protect your back." They produce automatic, unconscious responses and behaviors, which may explain why we recognize the feelings certain environments evoke in us, but not necessarily the causes.
Technology and dense urban living have only added another layer to the complex survival requirements and behaviors we bring to our environments. According to the research, our ancient survival needs are as important in modern cities as they are in the wilderness, as applicable to buildings as they are to forest groves. And when these fundamental needs are overlooked or marginalized by the built world, we lose -- tree by tree, species by species -- the potential to experience that "something important" -- to which Kaplan refers.
Our Relationship to Nature
What specifically do natural environments have that we seem to innately need but cannot find in built environments? The elaborate scientific explanation can be succinctly summed up as a very unique relationship between complexity and order. The abundance and diversity of sensory information in nature creates a rich tapestry of complexity not found in the built world. And this complexity, perceived and organized through sensory systems which evolved over thousands of years in natural environments, is what we use to evaluate our environments for survival potential.
Perceptual psychologist Laura Sewall calls this ability to perceive the dynamic relationships of nature through its complexity, our "ecological perception." Unfortunately, the built world rarely has this kind of complexity, and according to the biophilia hypothesis, our sensory systems simply cannot process as efficiently much of that kind of complexity that dominates artificial environments. Dr. Sewall warns that our sensory capacities, and consequently our ecological perception, have been "numbed" by the ever-widening gap we have created between ourselves and nature. We retreat to nature often unaware that what we are looking for is the kind of information our senses literally crave.
Social ecologist and contributor to The Biophilia Hypothesis, Stephen Kellert explains, "The dependence of the human psyche on highly varied and refined distinctions seems to be matched only by the extraordinary diversity, complexity and vividness of the natural world as an extremely rich and textured system."
Obviously, it is impractical -- if not impossible -- to infuse the built world with the levels and kinds of complexity found in nature, but the need for nature premise argues there is much to be learned from nature's complexity that would benefit built environments. For example, if nature's complexity provides the information, then its order provides the organization. The often heard phrase, "natural order of things," reflects our inherent understanding that the complexity of nature always is tempered by pattern and process. Nature's unique balance between complexity and order, diversity and sameness, novelty and familiarity satisfies not only numerous fundamental survival needs but many of our higher aspirations as well. Creativity, inspiration, spirituality and connectedness all are linked to this balance. However, it is the natural aesthetic experience that appears to be the catalyst for most of these other "high order" experiences.
For centuries, "aesthetics" was defined as a subjective aspect of culture, having little or no genetic or hereditary connections. According to Judith Heerwagens and Gordon Orians, writing in The Biophilia Hypothesis, "The neglect of nature is a by-product of the prevailing view that has dominated Western thinking -- namely, that cultural symbols and art forms create the aesthetic experience."
But if the biophilia hypothesis is correct, cultural aesthetics are actually an extension, an elaboration of natural aesthetics, deeply rooted in our earliest experience of nature. We are compelled to consider: if we valued natural aesthetic experiences in the same way we value culturally based aesthetic artifacts and pursuits such as art and music, perhaps the natural environment would receive our most serious respect and protection, and our built environments would resonate with natural diversity.
Restorative Environments
The Kaplans offer another perspective of the importance of natural aesthetic environments. Their research indicates that aesthetic natural settings not only give pleasure and are satisfying to experience, they also:
- support human functioning;
- provide a context in which information and complexity can be managed effectively;
- permit people to move about and explore with comfort and confidence;
- and provide for recovery from "mental fatigue."
These characteristics of nature make it a "restorative environment," according to the Kaplans. Many scientists believe this restorative function is the most important physical and psychological benefit we enjoy from our experience of nature.
Studies indicate that restorative natural environments have the ability to relieve stress, induce relaxation, increase awareness and perception, and promote positive physical and emotional states. These environments accomplish all this by redirecting our attention through interaction with nature (hiking, gardening, bird watching, lying on one's back and staring at the stars), and by evoking symbolic associations with natural elements and processes.
The use of nature as symbol is probably as ancient as our survival instincts, and just as deeply rooted in nature's balance of complexity and order. Stephen Kellert asserts that this "symbolic value" of nature is an important dimension of the biophilia tendency. Like the aesthetic experience of nature, natural symbolic experiences appear to be essential to what Kellert describes as a "meaningful and fulfilling human existence."
Perhaps the most important overall symbolic association we make through our direct interactions with natural environments was identified in 1975 by English geographer Jay Appleton. He proposed an influential theory of landscape/environmental aesthetics centering upon a concept he terms "prospect and refuge." Appleton describes prospect as a condition that allows us to view our surrounding unimpeded, while refuge is a place of concealment and retreat. Together they indicate the presence of safe places from which to explore -- a combination of characteristics that satisfies many fundamental survival needs as well as needs for higher order experiences.
Natural prospect symbolism includes the openness of a setting, and the presence of hills, mountains, promontories, climbable trees or other elevated features that afford expansive views. Natural refuge symbolism includes enclosed spaces, vegetation, contained fire and climbable trees with large canopies. (The fact that trees are symbolic of both prospect and refuge makes them very powerful symbols of survival and pleasure, perhaps accounting for their universal preference.)
Appleton argues that we seek and experience as pleasurable the juxtaposition of prospect to refuge in our environments. His theory is especially relevant when applied to analysis of built environments.
One important example is the work of Grant Hildebrand, professor of architecture and art history at the University of Washington. His research examines the relationship between Appleton's prospect/refuge theory and the "immediate and pervasive" appeal of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses. Hildebrand asks: Why, in spite of their numerous shortcomings (leaky roofs, unserviceable detailing, difficulty in accommodating reasonable furniture arrangements) do Wright's houses continue to have such enormous appeal? Why do they engender such positive responses from the general public and such loyalty -- even love -- from their owners?
He argues it is not due to "the explanations about liberation of space" or "the metaphor of expansive democratic life," suggested by art historians. "They worked and still work with enormous effectiveness," Hildebrand maintains, "because they stimulate those responses that are a part of why we are here."
In The Wright Space, published in 1991, Hildebrand analyzes the spatial characteristics of Wright's major houses and finds consistent patterns of prospect and refuge and important evidence of the Kaplans' concept of mystery and skillfully relates them to the naturally occurring relationships between complexity and order. He explains their effects this way: "It is a question of whether we sense, intuitively and immediately, that the building draws us in; that having been drawn in, we perceive that there are warmly constraining spaces juxtaposed with a grandeur of release; whether we feel that we hold the option of seeing without being seen; whether we enjoy the choice of prospect and refuge; whether we are led to explore inexhaustible complexities because we see them as variations within an evident and pervasive order."
Architecture is, and always has been, fundamentally a powerful symbol of refuge. The composite built world, however, is often refuge without prospect, complexity without order, hazard without mystery. Kaplan's "something important" may happen only in the natural world because in our built environments, as Carl Jung suggests, "contact with nature has gone and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied."
If this news is not met with great enthusiasm by everyone, perhaps it is because we do not like to hear that our efforts to turn wilderness into civilization have not been as good for us as we would like to think.
But the need for nature premise argues that we need a paradigm shift away from an ambient belief that built environments are separate from natural environments; that nature is what is "out there" beyond the walls we construct; that we are either "inside" or "outside." The need for nature premise holds that we should not view the natural world as a place to be modified by built environments. Rather, the built environment should be viewed as a place to be modified by us according to preferences inherited from our deep history in the natural world.
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