Inspiration from nature was in full view in the Art Nouveau designs of the late 19th Century.

Architect Victor
Horta’s exuberant plant tendrils lacing through buildings in Belgium, the lush flowers that are Louis Comfort
Tiffany lamps, and the explicitly biomorphic forms of Antonio Gaudí’s buildings all remain strong examples. In
Chicago, Louis Sullivan created elaborate ornamentation with leaves and cornices that represent tree branches. His
protégé, Frank Lloyd Wright, is part of the group that launched The Prairie School.

Wright abstracted prairie flowers and plants for his art glass windows and ornamentation. Like many in the
Craftsman movement, Wright used the grain of wood and texture of brick and stone as a decorative element. Wright
also opened up interiors to flow through houses in ways that had not been done before, creating prospect views
balanced with intimate refuges. His later designs sometimes include exhilarating spaces, like the balcony
cantilevering out over the waterfall at Fallingwater.

European Modernists stripped much ornamentation from their buildings, but like Wright, used wood grain and the
veining of stone as decorative elements, and were equally concerned with exploring the relationship of interior to
exterior. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion (built 1929) pushed that concept in the play of volumes
and glass. Later, his Farnsworth House (built 1951) defined interior and exterior much more literally, by segregating
the elements from the visual connection to nature.

Le Corbusier’s Cité Radiant (unbuilt 1924) may have resulted in disastrous urban designs, but by putting towers in a
park surrounded by grass and trees, he was trying to provide city dwellers with a connection to nature. As the
International Style took root, it spread glass buildings everywhere; unfortunately, the buildings, and particularly the
interiors of commercial buildings, increasingly disconnected people from nature.

The term ‘biophilia’ was first coined by social psychologist Eric Fromm (The Heart of Man, 1964) and later
popularized by biologist Edward Wilson (Biophilia, 1984). The sundry denotations – which have evolved from
within the fields biology and psychology, and been adapted to the fields of neuroscience, endocrinology,
architecture and beyond – all relate back to the desire for a (re)connection with nature and natural systems. That we
should be genetically predisposed to prefer certain types of nature and natural scenery, specifically the savanna, was
posited by Gordon Orians and Judith Heerwagen (Savanna Hypothesis, 1986), and could theoretically be a
contributing motivation for moving to the suburbs, with the suburban lawn being a savanna for everyone.
With the emergence of the green building movement in the early 1990s, linkages were made between improved
environmental quality and worker productivity (Browning & Romm, 1994). While the financial gains due to
productivity improvements were considered significant, productivity was identified as a placeholder for health and
well-being, which have even broader impact. The healing power of a connection with nature was established by
Roger Ulrich’s landmark study comparing recovery rates of patients with and without a view to nature (Ulrich,
1984). An experiment at a new Herman Miller manufacturing facility, designed by William McDonough + Partners
in the 1990s, was one of the first to specifically frame the mechanism for gains in productivity to connecting
building occupants to nature – phylogenetic or, more familiarly, biophilic design