Even in the city, nature is ready to offer a calming refuge and respite from the urban din. Forested buildings and new designs with living walls are helping urban dwellers to nurture their innate connection to the wild.
Our far distant ancestors had a tight bond with the earth as they wandered around the savannah. As that connection mutated, albeit at a snail’s pace, hunter-gatherers evolved into planters of seeds. And that slow, meandering timeline stretching back across the long millennia only serves to show what a shockwave we’ve experienced in the few hundred years since the Industrial Revolution effectively severed our ancient relationship with soil and sludge.
More than 50 gardens in the south-eastern city of Suzhou epitomize the Chinese aesthetic of replicating the quietude of nature in miniature, while honoring via design elements both the freehand style of early Chinese landscape painting and the intellectual discipline of the masters behind it. (Shutterstock)
Gardens symbolize the evolving relationship between humans and their environment. And different styles of horticulture tell how different nationhoods define themselves. Take the classical gardens of Suzhou in China, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Created in the 11th century in the Northern Song dynasty, over the next 800 years they were developed and refined under the exact same philosophical template of presenting lush natural landscapes in miniature. Rockery, water, curving pathways, meaningful planting and simple buildings reflect the principles of feng shui. Japanese garden design mirrors this aesthetic even more naturalistically, with its seductive abundance of moss-carpeted glades that softly echo the song of primordial forests.
The regimentally sculpted arrays of potted shrubs and the emblematic pruning back of nature at the Palace of Versailles, outside Paris, could not send a clearer stamp of monarchy’s authority and man’s notional pre-eminence in the world. (Shutterstock)
Now contrast the oriental ethic of gardens that quietly honor nature with gardens organized to control it. Such as at the lavish Palace of Versailles, the confection of Louis XIV, the Sun King around whom French society revolved, who in 1661 instructed landscape impresario André de Nôtre to design a pleasure ground eventually extending to 800 hectares (1976 acres) that would proclaim his status as absolute monarch ruling with divine right. Here, snipped topiary curtails the natural growth of shrubs, parterres impose a rigid geometry, grottoes evoke mythical gods, fountains spout their power into the air.
Appropriately opposite the Real Jardín Botánico and the art treasure house of the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, international architects Herzog & de Meuron transformed a former power station into the CaixaForum socio-cultural center, with a not-too-shy suggestion of the value of nature in our city lives. (Shutterstock)
Modern-day creatures are still working on their relationship with nature, especially with more than half the world’s 8 billion people living in cities. At one time, if you moved from rus to urbe, you pretty much relinquished a connection to the wild. Now we know better, and we know more.
Four decades ago, outlier biologist E.O. Wilson posited that we’re all hard-wired to be attracted to nature, something he called biophilia. Recent studies show Wilson was onto something. Researchers confirm that regardless of where we live or what culture we grew up in, humans gravitate to images of nature, especially those of the savannah, writes author Richard Louv, who coined the term nature-deficit disorder in describing children’s alarming lack of time in the outdoors.
Environmental psychologist Sally Augustin writes about the power of nature photos in accessing sensory processing circuits in our brains. “These responses are so fundamental that today just looking at the sorts of spaces where we would have thrived eons ago gives us a psychological boost,” she writes in Psychology Today.
This is an airport. As we casually command the skies and wing our way around the world at will, the international hub that is Singapore Changi Airport’s Terminal 2 departure hall carefully invites us to remember the more ancient and still-living roots of our very earliest points of departure. (Shutterstock)
We know too that being surrounded by plants and trees in a park, on a massive hydroponic wall or on the rooftop of a skyscraper, improves our mental well-being, decreases anxiety, reduces stress and ramps up our cognitive abilities. That’s why we choose to live in places with views – a garden flat in London, a penthouse overlooking New York’s Central Park. Something in us is saying keep the outdoors close.
Green spaces in cities have long mastered the trick of providing refuge from the thrum of the urban din, an escape from the city without leaving the city. Nature offers something our burgeoning tech world does not: a random order that calms and connects. “Our brain is soothed by the sound of rain or the hum of a waterfall because the rhythm is itself rhythmless,” Daniel Kaul writes in an essay for earth.org. “The bark of a tree or the shape of a cloud exhibits the same designless design.”
Architect Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale in Milan’s business district actively confronts the presumptions of glass-faced high-rises (as 94% of skyscrapers built since 2000 are.) Instead of reflected sunlight causing heat-surge on the ground below, Boeri’s statement planting converts 20,000 kg of carbon each year. (Shutterstock)
City planners working to scale up foliage in urban areas do so for good reason. Parks, the proverbial lungs of the city, clean the air and provide much-needed shade on a warming planet. And architects are likewise responding by making green space front and centre of designs. Milan-based Stefano Boeri is the star architect of “vertical forests.” More than a decade ago, he completed two residential towers in the Porta Nuova business district of his Italian hometown that feature glass façades covered with 800 trees and 15,000 plants. The towers were inspired by Italo Calvino’s 1957 novel The Baron in the Trees and resemble giant treehouses. They have inspired similar spaces in Shanghai, Beijing, Paris and Eindhoven. West meets east in shared endeavor.
Kö-Bogen II’s five-mile hedge façade may be the ultimate in green drapery – it’s the largest in Europe – but local context matters too. Architect Christoph Ingenhoven: “It oscillates in a deliberate indeterminacy between city and park, entering into a dialogue with the Hofgarten.” Also worth remembering: “In winter no heating is required.” (Alamy)
Düsseldorf, Germany claims the largest greened-up building in the world. Kö-Bogen II may be an office block, but it’s covered in 30,000 hornbeam hedges and resembles a living, breathing beast. Largescale greenery has flourished on a wall in Madrid’s Caixa Forum since 2007. To offset the impact of its business, Rome’s Fiumcino airport has recently installed a series of vertical garden walls. Singapore’s Changi airport offers a six-acre indoor forest with walking trails and a massive indoor waterfall. And inside Amazon’s Spheres workspace in Seattle, 40,000 plants remind staff that next day delivery has an existential eco-meaning too.
As if mushrooming slowly out of the ground with a life-force that threatens the high-rise canyons of downtown Seattle, the vegetation-filled three-dome Amazon Spheres (covered in pentagonal hexecontahedron panels, as you would expect) give public notice of the inexhaustible power of plants. (Alexandra Tran/Unsplash)
What comes next? Some skeptics say cities need to plant even more trees and plants to benefit all people, not just those who live in upscale residences or work in commercial buildings. Others are reposting the Woodstock generation’s belief that “we got to get ourselves back to the garden”. What’s certain is that our human connection to nature is non-negotiable. It doesn’t matter why we need to spend more time in nature, it just matters that we do.
Main image: Architecture. Broaching and breeching, or endlessly reaching towards, nature? (Shutterstock)
