“The Passionate Love Of Life And All That Is Alive” (Fromm,

While reading different essays addressing the topic of nature, I came to the conclusion that they all shared the idea that being outside can make an impact in everyone no matter if you believe you only belong in a city or forest because it can bring you serenity and show you all the amazing things you wouldn't be able to see anywhere else. In Wendell Berry’s essay “An Entrance to the Woods,” he states that people can use the quiet of the woods to forget all their problems. Berry wrote “One is that, though I am here in body, my mind and my nerves too are not yet altogether here. We seem to grant to our high-speed roads and our airlines the rather thoughtless assumption that people can change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported.” Nature has a way to transport ones mind and spirit elsewhere while the body is left behind on earth as we travel deep into thought. Adding on to that idea, the essay “A City Person Encountering Nature” by Maxine Hong Kingston the author explains that nature is a giver of peace and patience with its slow cycles that may frustrate people, but help keep a sane mind. Society is fast paced, making everyone feel that they need to keep the same pace in order to get things done, but we don't realize that although our bodies are moving and pushing, our minds are exhausted and cannot keep up with the fast pace. Kingston wrote “Preferring the city myself, I can better discern natural phenomena when books point them out; I also need to verify

Nature in its tranquility provides a calming sensation away from the buzzing city life. The ability

Interior design and architecture are essential, and often overlooked, aspects of everyday life. In modern society people rely on function, durability, and visual appeal when selecting designs for their homes, businesses, and places of leisure. The way that a space is designed influences such things as mood, which, in the case of a business, can impact the productivity of employees and either draw or repel customers. In residential design, the design becomes very personal and, to be considered a successful design, must properly reflect the home owner while at the same time offering some practicality that makes the space livable. An effective design, for any space, must solve some problem, be it function, flexibility, or some other criteria. Simply solving a problem would not please the customer, however, unless it offered some visual appeal. Creating function with style is the real job of any interior designer, and is essential in a content society.

Over the past few decades a small number of designers and design professionals have begun to realize their influence on the natural world and have decided to change the way they think of design and designing. This new approach has become known as sustainable design. Sustainable Design is a design philosophy that seeks to maximize the quality of the built environment, while minimizing or eliminating negative impact to the natural environment. In others words designing physical objects with the idea of creating under the principles of ecological sustainable compositions. This type of design is being having great advance and advertising during the last couple of years, therefore is becoming a new alternative in terms of designing and

Natural shapes and forms, including animal motifs and spirals also evoke a sense of nature. A sense of light and space can be reached through filtered and diffused light, which lead to a sense of spatial harmony and a natural flow of circulation. There is also a vernacular dimension to biophilic design, as place-based relationships can come from landscaping features that define the form of a building. These all work together to further evolve the human-nature relationship and lead to the incredible benefits of biophilic

Just by the sound of it, it seems so easy to understand that a population that is of diverse nature definitely requires a corresponding diverse environment upon which it can thrive and succeed. This philosophy rules out the whole idea as to why architects are continuing to come up with one size fits all design environments. The question is as to whether their main intention is to create and or trying to ensure equality. But as already set, the society is composed of a diverse population, which is a reason enough as to why diverse architectural designs are important for the masses. Critics may attribute this trend to the notion that methods of construction as well as the costs associated with diverse designs, alongside the respective site restrictions tend to make the diverse environment to become infeasible both economically as well as physically. On the contrary in this view, this way of thinking only makes it difficult for the designers to understand the manner in which the diverse populations are affected by the buildings.

Non-Contextual designs have abundant amounts of thought put into the design. The architects gather information from all around them. They take in the nature, the culture, and the

“Biophilic design offers a positive vision of how we can achieve lives of meaning and satisfaction through our experience of the natural world.” Biophilia addresses the human need for nature, many findings are in line with green design and sustainability. It is the study of a ‘humans inherent tendency to affiliate with the natural environment.’

Inside the discipline of environmental design there exist many approaches than can be used when observing a site or while planning a project. Some of these approaches are the social context, ecological, participatory, artistic, and the cultural competency approach. For this project in specific, I focused on the social context and ecological approaches, because for me they are the most interesting and crucial when planning a project. The social context approach focuses on the people that use the site, how they interact in and with it, and their needs. Observing all the different types of people, what they do, and how they use the space was simply astonishing and also quite fun. On the contrary, the ecological approach worries about the plants and animals rather than in the people. “By employing the ecological method we can discern the reason for the city, comprehend its natural form, discern those elements of identity which are critical and expressive” (Mcharg, 1967, p.41). This approach interested me since we first talked about it in class because I am an environmental science major and I’m passionate about all the natural sciences such as ecology and biology. I used each approach to analyze a certain area, the Quad, in two extremely different ways. The Quad is a large patch of grass, surrounded by trees, that is located south of the Memorial Union. It is divided by a narrow bath of concrete that crosses the entire Quad, dividing it into East and West Quad. It is a popular

Ecological design is the sole responsibility of innovation and the creativity of products and objects that will sustain our society and future societies. It is critical that we change the way sustainable design is perceived and interpreted, by beginning to develop an understanding of the history and journey from ‘Green design’ into ‘Sustainable design’ as well as looking at the direction in which we would like it to progress to. This requires a comprehension of what these initial terms mean and how this relates to their cultural, social and economic context, all of

Sustainability, today’s buzz word that has gained popularity as more people have become aware of its importance, can be seen in the designed sites that function in harmony with the landscape and natural systems. The rise of sustainable design can be contributed to the advocacy of environmentalism through organizations and increase of designers with environmental philosophies. Michael Manfredi and Marion Weiss are examples of such designers, bringing sustainable design to the public realm. Influenced by their social and cultural experiences, Weiss and Manfredi bring together the architectural and the natural. One of their best examples of this is Brooklyn’s Botanical Garden Visitor Center, which serves as “an interface between

Bio-mimicry stretches its horizon to architecture as well. Erin Rovalo from Biomimicry 3.8 says, “The natural world and ecological system are maybe the best picture for what a sustainable world looks and performs like, and if our built environment can function like these ecosystems, maybe that’s the pinnacle of what sustainable design can be.” (Poon, 2016) Guided by the same fundamentals and inspired by the structure of termite mounds, ‘The East Gate Building’, an office complex in Zimbabwe has an internal climate control system. In the

Architects are now called upon to create designs that provide social change, improve the health of a building’s inhabitants, increase equality and in general improve social life (Dutton and Mann 1996 in Woodward 2007, 3). Bioclimatic design falls within this brief as it priviledges designs that are at one with the surrounding climate and produce a harmonious microclimate for the inhabitants, thus improving health and providing social change. However, until recently technical aspects of producing bioclimatic designs were ceded to specialist-trained engineers in the field of Bioclimatics (Altomonte 2009, 13). Thus, keeping architectural education focused on its long-held traditions of culture, emotion and improving the landscape. This ensures that there is a continued gap between the traditional education of new architects and the education of principles of bioclimatic design. Which makes it difficult for architects to incorporate bioclimatic principles into their final designs.

The architectural industry is facing another major challenge in the field of sustainability. Sustainable architecture must adhere to the US Green Building Council’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). This movement, also referred to as green building, focuses on utilizing sustainable resources to increase an overall better wellness of its inhabitants, while reducing harmful effects on the environment. In addition, the focus of green building has expanded to help prevent pollution, control waste, and conserve

Biomimicry is becoming more influential in architectural design due to the recent insights gleaned by this practice. Biomimicry applied design can be dissected into three main areas based upon the scale of the element that is being mimicked. The Organism level concentrates on a