Biophilic Design Aesthetics in Art and Design Education

Abstract

landscape features (for example, complexity), nature sounds, animal life, and so on.12 2.2. Biophilic design aesthetics requires contextual responsiveness The fact that biophilic design can employ low-level visual features of naturalness in architecture seems to point to the relevance of “digital architecture” for biophilic design.13 This architectural trend arose during the mid-1990s, and its designs very often have profoundly biomorphic, organic forms (which is a low-level visual feature shared by many biological entities). As the notion “digital” suggests, computers and digital design software play a prominent role in this design strand. What is crucial to the design methods underlying digital architecture is that the digital tools are not exclusively instruments for drawing the proposals of the architect. Instead, along with the architect, the computer has become an active creative agent in the design processes.14 To clarify this matter further let me give a concrete example of how digital architecture may (conceptually) work. In many cases the architectural surfaces from which digital design experiments start off can colloquially be considered as (digitalized) flexible rubber sheets. The designer then selects some information or data set: for example, the trajectories of people walking around the future building site. That information is then digitally captured and transformed into vectors or force-fields, which subsequently deform the initial flexible architectural surface in an unpredictable manner. In many cases, the result of this design process is a highly “organic” architectural shape. On first sight the relevance of digital architecture seems obvious to my discussion of the characteristics of biophilic design. Its curved, biomorphic forms evoke and symbolize naturalness, and this apparently makes digital architecture into an eminent example of what biophilic architecture could look like. I believe, however, that this is only partially true. The reason is that digital architecture has—up to now—not been genuinely “interested” in elements that transcend itself. Although external contextual information (for example, movement patterns of individuals) has a prominent place in digital architecture, that information is generally deemed to be relevant and worth considering only insofar as it contributes to generating new design proposals. Such information is usually not employed for reaching an adaptive fit between the design and an individual’s needs or wishes, although digital architecture does not intrinsically preclude this. At this stage such design proposals appear to be primarily aimed at developing an interesting JAE 45.2 text.indd 21 4/14/11 2:18 PM This content downloaded from 157.55.39.45 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 06:15:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms