People pay a lot of money for a restaurant table, hotel room or apartment with a good view, but prospect has it’s most dramatic effect as part of a sequence. The geographer Jay Appleton (1919-2015) famously advocated that people prefer views, scenes, paintings, and by implication, landscapes, in which there’s an element of both prospect and of refuge. We are programmed biologically…More
Tag Archives: nature
Natural enemies
It’s tempting to think of the natural world as a casualty of sophisticated communications technologies. Everywhere, always-on networked phones and computers diminish spatial demarcation, and threaten the uniqueness and placeness of natural environments. In their 1998 book Contested Natures, sociologists Phil Macnaghten and John Urry draw on various sources to argue the converse. “As spatial barriers diminish, so we become…More
Poiēsis
Planet Earth is a giant spherical communications machine with a diameter of about 84,000 kilometres. Well over 1,000 satellites orbit between the earth’s surface and this outer (geosynchronous) layer. Nature and artefact seem to merge due to the scale, ubiquity, sophistication, and conceits of contemporary techno-science, especially if we add to the global communications infrastructure the prospects of geo-engineering intended…More
Nature into the city
Parks, gardens, tree-lined streets, balconies, atria, glasshouses, allotments, bird feeders, green walls, nature reserves, aviaries, zoos: these are amongst the most obvious ways that planners, designers and citizens bring nature into the city. But something similar happens via certain marginal urban practices, that by their very nature construct and re-construct the city as wilderness, bringing the values…More
Making nature
Biophilic design is design that is sympathetic to nature. Designers who want their buildings and landscapes to exhibit biophilic qualities have at least 70 attributes to draw on, e.g. use natural colours, water, plant motifs, natural shapes and forms (like shells), allude to growth and other natural processes, introduce natural and filtered light, connect with history, the…More
Windowphilia
Windowphilia is a fondness for windows — or fenestraphilia, or parathyrophilia. A Google search doesn’t reveal much about either term, but biophilia is in common usage, and in the OED. I’ve been reading the book by Sue Thomas called Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace. (Technobiophilia hasn’t yet made it to the OED.) Her book endorses the role of digital technologies in expanding…More
The animal within
Are you fascinated by what differentiates you from other living things, in particular other mobile living beings that occupy similar spatial dimensions and habitats to us, i.e. other land animals? The bodily functions are similar, we ingest, defecate, reproduce, sleep, nurture, cooperate, hunt, and evade pursuit. I’ve been reading Giorgio Agamben who makes us aware of the animal in our own being. Some people think…More
Losing it
Location technologies and smartphones help you find your way. But for some of the time, some of us don’t only want to find our way — but lose it. Loss goes with forgetting, regret, and grief as in the art work Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper — a single red ceramic poppy in the…More
Nature versus smartphones
People are eager to extol the benefits of fresh green vegetables, education, marriage, and a walk in the countryside, but are instinctively suspicious of new technologies. That’s the tagline selected by the editors for the cover story I wrote for Interactions Magazine published this month. Interactions is a bimonthly publication of the ACM, and sees itself…More
Born of the Earth
Androids are made not born. “Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction,” wrote Donna Haraway. Automata are not the only beings denied parentage. Remember, “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground” (Genesis 2:7). Fast forward 4 minutes into the recent video installation by Bill Viola in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, to see man rising from the dust of…More