Nature-inspired design is fine, but let's not get carried away

Let me tell you why I don’t like it when architects design pillars and columns that look like trees and branches. Given the opportunity, very few of them, it seems, can resist the urge. They call them “dendriform” columns. Some of the very best architects in the world have done it.

You’ll find them on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Building and on the Mall of Africa. The more you look, the more you’ll start seeing branches and canopies sprouting from pillars wherever you go. Some of them are undeniably beautiful, playing with fractals and geometric patterns to pay tribute to what is in many ways nature’s proto-shelter: the tree. And some of the architecture is very good. But they make me suspicious.

Part of this trend has it roots (forgive me) in an architectural philosophy or approach called biophilic design, which is a special kind of green or sustainable design that attempts to include elements of nature in the design of buildings. It actively fosters a connection between people and the natural world, premised on an innate connection between humans and nature.

Now, some of this devolves into little more than interior decorators advocating for pot plants or architects taking corny literal “inspiration” from natural patterns (like trees and branches for instance!).

On the other hand, some of it is truly inspirational. Recently completed local projects like Green School SA just outside Paarl and others that are planned, such as The Fynbos on Bree Street in Cape Town, have begun introducing it comprehensively in local architecture.

Proper biophilic buildings take care to consider and draw in natural light, fresh air and include the presence of plants, water, birds, insects and other animals, and so on. It’s the opposite of a hermetically sealed, artificially air-conditioned environment.

Of course, the ideals of sustainable or even regenerative design are inherent in biophilic design — buildings that don’t only do “less harm” to the environment, but that actively help to undo damage, rehabilitate the landscape and reintroduce biodiversity. Rather than taking resources from the natural world, biophilic architecture helps restore it. 

There is no end of studies which show that people are happier and healthier in biophilic buildings — they’re more productive and learn better. A really good building can help people understand themselves as part of the planet’s ecosystems, ultimately encouraging them care for it.

I have no beef with any of this. One of the principles of biophilic design that I love the most is the idea of “organised complexity”, which makes a welcome change from the idea of minimalism being the only path to serenity and peace.

There’s a kind of visual richness in nature that is quite distinct from the kind of clutter and chaos that causes stress. There can be harmony in irregularity, something humanising in texture and tactility, not to mention a sense of hope in the unfinished or unrefined.

Part of what makes so many sleek spaceship-like corporate interiors feel spiritually deadening is the very fact that they are perfected. They’re too complete and final, in a way that allows very little sense of the passage of time. They do not include any possibility of understanding ourselves or the world as part of natural or human history. They leave no role for us to play, so they leave us feeling weirdly excluded from the bright future they’re supposed to represent.

At the same time, when design and architecture start mimicking natural forms, it sets off alarm bells not dissimilar from those corporate bubbles. I don’t think I’m completely off track when I find some of the rhetoric surrounding certain kinds of green design tipping over into a quasi-religious sense that the patterns we find in nature actually constitute a code for living. It’s even there in the hinting implication that we might be nicer and behave better in the right kind of environment.

In nature there is undeniably a sense, if not of order, then at least that there are shapes and proportions or even complex formulas that underpin its structures, from the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio to the flower of life and various other sacred geometries.

But when people start thinking that uncovering nature’s underlying logic reveals a set of rules for living — a template for a social order based on a natural order — we start heading down a dangerous path. Honeycomb patterns are a miracle of efficiency, but that doesn’t mean we should organise cities like beehives.

There was a trend some decades ago for discerning astrological secrets in the arrangement of the ruins of ancient cultures: complex mathematical formulas encoded in Stonehenge, for example, or astrological insights programmed into Aztec temples or Egyptian pyramids. The suggestion is that these lost civilisations actually had some sort of secret cosmological wisdom that allowed them to prosper in harmony with nature and the gods, but which we have lost. To go forward, the argument goes, we need to go back and reconnect with this ancient wisdom. The apocalyptic woes of our own time — from 20th century fears of a nuclear holocaust to the climate disaster and plagues of our own century — somehow stem from our loss of this primal connection.

Sometimes it seems a similar kind of thinking creeps into the way we talk about living, building and designing in harmony with nature. It turns into something more like looking to nature for an answer as to how we should order society. In fact, I would go so far as to say there is something of the taint of a totalitarian “solution” in this way of thinking; the old mistake of dictating what is natural and right, and imposing it universally.

The best biophilic design does not prescribe rules, but reminds us, each individually, that we are responsible for the survival of the planet (and ourselves). There is something more democratic underpinning it: an individual sense of responsibility, power and above all choice (even if, ultimately, we all have to do it). But that’s trickier to design than a column that looks like a tree.