In a blog by for the The National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP) Nikos A. Salingaros looks at how buildings and urban spaces can provide healing environments for people, exploring ‘Biophilia’ is the attachment of humans to living structures, to argue that ‘Preservation should prioritize the therapeutic qualities of the environment and focus on the health-enhancing properties of older buildings and urban spaces.’
A view from the interior of Phillip Johnson’s Glass House—an example of biophilia tangible at a historic site. | Credit: Priya Chhaya
The National Trust for Historic Preservation writes:
A city’s building stock, like the supply in any ecosystem, needs to be replenished on a continuous basis. Yet demolition and replacement have devastated large swaths of healthy living environments around the world solely to churn profits for an industry sector. Preservation should prioritize the therapeutic qualities of the environment and focus on the health-enhancing properties of older buildings and urban spaces.
The Biological Dimension: ‘Biophilia’ is the attachment of humans to living structures, and it combines two distinct components. The first is the healing effect from intimate contact with living biological forms—for example, looking out a window onto plant and human life or being in urban spaces that optimize encounters with other people. The second requires our structures to mimic the mathematical processes that generate biological forms, including fractal scaling (that is, dimensions repeating all the way down to the smallest details) and the organization of complexity that produces ornamentation.
Another Approach: Re-aligning the fields of architecture and preservation to emphasize the therapeutic qualities of buildings may resolve trenchant divisions within the disciplines. Present-day architectural culture abandons historical buildings to their fates because they do not satisfy the preferred canonical abstract style, which seeks to preserve only industrial-modernist buildings. Historians take up the cause for preservation, but naturally use historical criteria. Focusing on buildings exclusively as historical artifacts disregards the qualities of healing environments.
To preserve what is significant to our communities, our building culture, and our heritage of healthy environments, we need to apply new tools…
Nikos A. Salingaros is an internationally known urbanist, architectural theorist, author, and professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
