Philip Johnson’s Glass House moved to a parking lot has no biophilic properties. Drawing by Nikos Salingaros

The extraordinary success of many 20th and 21st Century buildings with organic shapes has arisen almost entirely from biophilia. I brush aside their architects’ own explanations crediting technical aspects of the design process — such as paper crumpling, or using a particular design software — which have little to do with a building’s effect on users. It is safe to say that their clients paid for them and the juries of design competitions chose them because they felt a strong attraction to the original drawings. The finished buildings tend to lack the full spectrum of biophilic qualities, however, and so cannot be considered an unqualified success.

The biophilic qualities that make a building immediately attractive are perceived very differently at various distances. This can create a problem in buildings whose scaling relationships work against biophilia. A building could be biophilic as seen from a distance but not close up, or vice versa. Or, the building could incorporate no biophilic elements itself; yet steal biophilic credit from its natural surroundings. Famous examples of the latter are the Glass House (1949), by Philip Johnson, and the Farnsworth House (1945-1951) by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, two transparent houses set in the woods.....Continue Reading

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