[wordup] Biophilia - A Newly Electric Green - Sustainable Energy, Resources and Design

[Adam Shand]

This is amazing, especially the pictures of Fallingwater which I hadn't 
seen before.  More on Fallingwater here:

   http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stwright/frank-lloyd-wright/fallingwater.html

It also seems to tie in fairly closely with the ideas of New Urbanism, 
all of which seem to be making fact of common sense.

   http://www.spack.org/wiki/NewUrbanism

Now they just need to figure out how to make better living accessible 
so you don't have to be as wealthy as the Kaufmann's to benefit. ;-)

From: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000664.html

Biophilia - A Newly Electric Green - Sustainable Energy, Resources and 
Design
By Jeremy Faludi
Fri, 7 May 2004 11:53 AM

One design methodology that's gaining popularity in the green movement 
is "Biophilia". It's not a new idea--Edward O Wilson first proposed it 
twenty years ago--but in the last few years studies have begun to be 
done, showing it has significant and measurable effects on people's 
state of mind. The idea is that people function best in environments 
like the ones we evolved in, with other life around and with spaces 
that are more like habitats than like Cartesian boxes. Biophilia 
dovetails perfectly with green building because it involves giving 
buildings natural lighting and outdoor air, plants, water, and 
generally blurring the boundaries between building and landscape. 
Furthermore, it gives green building more of a soul than merely 
improving HVAC and fluorescent lighting.

In biophilic spaces, patients recover more quickly, students learn 
better, retail sales are higher, workplace productivity goes up, and 
absenteeism goes down. Sometimes the differences are up to 15 or 20%, 
which is huge (and retail sales can increase by a staggering 40% just 
from daylighting); in many workplace environments, the financial gains 
from even a 10% increased worker productivity can pay for a green 
retrofit two or three times over. This is a much more effective 
bargaining tool than energy savings, as most offices spend 100 to 1000 
times the amount of money on salaries as they do on building energy.

Some success stories for Biophilia include Frank Lloyd Wright's 
Fallingwater (widely considered the most important piece of American 
architecture in the last hundred years), ING Bank headquarters in 
Amsterdam (where absenteeism went down 15%), and Village Homes in 
Davis, California (which local real estate brochures describe as 
"Davis's most desirable subdivision"). A  Rocky Mountain Institute 
article describes it further:

> Judith Heerwagen... and Prof. Gordon Orians... surveyed people in a 
> variety of cultures and locations around the world to see if there 
> were a preferred image of landscape. What they and others found is 
> that people prefer landscapes that have copses of trees with 
> horizontal canopies, water, elevation changes, distant views, flowers, 
> indications of other people or inhabited structures-all elements that 
> indicate possible food, shelter, and places to explore (or, as 
> Heerwagen and Gordon Orians describe it in The Biophilia Hypothesis, 
> "habitability cues, resource availability, shelter and predator 
> protection, hazard cues, wayfinding and movement")...
>
>  biophilic [building] design attributes include:
>  - the use of dynamic and diffuse daylight,
>  - the ability to have frequent, spontaneous and repeated contact with 
> nature throughout and between buildings,
>  - the use of local, natural materials,
>  - a connection between interior and exterior surfaces,
>  - natural ventilation,
>  - a direct physical connection to nature from interior spaces, and
>  - direct visual access to nature from interior spaces.

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