Biophilia

Definition

Biophilia names the theory — and the design movement built on it — that human beings are "encoded with a biological connection to the landscape, systems, and ambient features of the non-human environment" through the course of evolution, and that this connection "is critical to our psychological and physiological well-being." As assembled by Laura Garófalo-Khan's chapter from the Biophilic Design anthology (Kellert, Heerwagen & Mador eds., 2008), the theory is supported by studies that "attempt to quantify the benefits of being exposed to nature": exposure to vegetative/landscape patterns and natural systems is credited with "improved recovery time for hospital patients, productivity levels, and cognitive functions," and "such patterns, whether organic or human-made, stimulate positive social behaviors." Crucially, biophilia "represents an attitude toward nature that does not separate the artifice of humans from the living forms of the natural world" (Kieran) — the category is not nature-versus-design but design as continuous with living systems.

The wiki holds biophilia as the interior-architecture cluster's evolutionary-psychological warrant for multisensory design, alongside its phenomenological warrant (embodiment, atmosphere). Its architectural extension is biophilic design: the programme that maintains the encoded connection by bringing natural systems, patterns, and — the chapter's distinctive contribution — the ornamental surface into the interior. Two design figures carry it: Kent Bloomer's diagnosis that the modern deep interior suffers an "extreme sensual disconnection from nature" behind its "visual distantiation, physical separation, and even a sense of supremacy over nature" (the picture window's paradox — see picture-window), cured by "small-scaled, repetitive, or rhythmic ornament that 'contests the material reality of the [modernist] box'"; and the chapter's own touchstone typology, the artificial-grotto, "not so much a lived-in building as a living building." Bloomer's formulation of what biophilic ornament must do: its formal acts — rhythmization, changefulness, competition between species of things — "convey measures of indefiniteness, temporality, impermanence, mystery, ambivalence, and growth… but all of them proclaim life, which is the subject of biophilia."

A historiographic caution the chapter itself supplies: "Although the word natural is no longer applicable once we acknowledge we have entered the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch that recognizes humanity's impact on our planet," the term is retained in the chapter as shorthand for "the non-human ecological, geological, ambient, and environmental features that are generally seen as 'nature.'" Biophilia's "nature" is thus already a designed category — the caveat that links the concept to unnatural-nature and the nature-vs-culture debate.

Key Thinkers

• Stephen Kellert — editor of Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science, and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life (2008), the chapter's principal source ("Dimensions, Elements, and Attributes of Biophilic Design," pp. 3–7); not yet paged (see log).
• Laura Garófalo-Khan — the transmission into interior architecture: biophilia as the frame for "sensorial manifestations of ambient conditioning and performative ornamentation."
• Kent Bloomer — the ornament-theorist of the movement: "The Picture Window" (2008) and the "dynamic line work of ornament"; not yet paged (see log).
• Stephen Kieran — the definitional source: biophilia as an attitude that "does not separate the artifice of humans from the living forms of the natural world" (2008); not yet paged (see log).
• Judith Heerwagen & Bert Gregory — "Biophilia and Sensory Aesthetics" (2008): the sensory-richness tenets the chapter reads back into Art Nouveau and Frank Lloyd Wright; not yet paged (see log).
• Edward O. Wilson — the term's originator (biophilia as "the urge to affiliate with other forms of life," 1984) — the background the wiki's sources presuppose; not yet paged (see log).

Related Concepts

• artificial-grotto — the typology through which biophilic design enters the wiki: the interior formed from the landscape that "expresses the guiding principles of biophilic design."
• performative-ornament — the design mechanism: ornament as the "valuable ally in the 'biophilization' of the interior" (Bloomer's three formal acts).
• picture-window — the condition biophilic design diagnoses: visual connection without haptic engagement.
• ecology — the planetary-scale frame (Latour/Gaia) that biophilia scales down to the body and the room: the interior as the site where the human-nature connection is either cultivated or severed.
• embodiment — the phenomenological sibling: both ground design in the body; biophilia adds the evolutionary claim that the ground is biological as well as existential.
• atmosphere — the ambient features (light, temperature, moisture, smell, sound) whose conditioning biophilic design treats as the medium of the nature-connection.
• sensorial-interior-landscape — the chapter's name for the interior aesthetic biophilic design redefines.
• interactive-architecture — the responsive-installation kinship: Hylozoic Soil's proximity sensors and programmed activity as biophilic ornament's technological form.
• nature-vs-culture — the divide biophilic design is explicitly built to "break down… concretized by the modernist movement."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Sensorial interior landscapes (Garófalo-Khan 2018) — the concept's source in this wiki: the biophilia/biophilic-design distinction; the well-being studies (hospital recovery, productivity, cognition, social behavior); Kieran's non-separation definition; Bloomer's picture-window diagnosis and ornament programme; the "biophilization of the interior"; the Anthropocene footnote.
• source-notes/brownell-2018-living-rooms-hypernaturalization

Open Questions

• Is biophilia a scientific theory (evolutionary claims about encoded affiliation, testable by recovery-time and productivity studies) or a design ideology dressed in scientific citation — and does the distinction matter for its architectural authority?
• If "biophilia represents an attitude toward nature that does not separate the artifice of humans from the living forms of the natural world," does the concept collapse into ecology's hybrids (Latour) — or does the evolutionary warrant give it a claim Latour's symmetry deliberately refuses (an evolved, species-specific need)?
• Bloomer's ornament "proclaims life" through "indefiniteness, temporality, impermanence, mystery, ambivalence, and growth" — are these properties of the ornament itself (the shell's changefulness) or of the life it figures, and can dead matter proclaim life at all (the grotto is stone)?
• The Anthropocene footnote concedes that "natural" is "no longer applicable" — can biophilic design keep its evolutionary warrant while its object ("nature") is admitted to be a human-made category, or does the footnote quietly convert biophilia into the design of designed natures (cf. unnatural-nature)?- "Living" rooms (Brownell 2018) — the materials-science register of the same nature-turn: where Garófalo-Khan gives biophilia its typological warrant (the grotto) and Bloomer its ornamental mechanism, Brownell gives its technological programme — "interior vegetated surface systems employ oxygenating plants' intrinsic capabilities to purify air" (the CASE/SOM Active Phytoremediation Wall System, "hydroponic plants [that] absorb interior toxins through their exposed roots"), daylight and ventilation's "beneficial health effects," and photovoltaics harvesting "light from indirect and electric sources, making them suitable for interior applications." The chapter's Le Corbusier reversal ("not a machine for living, but rather a living machine") names the biophilic interior's contemporary form: hypernaturalization. See performative-ornament, ambient-conditioning, unnatural-nature.