Naturaleza: The Latest Architecture and News

Humanity's relationship with insects is ancient and complex. While they can spread disease and wipe out crops, they are also vital to our survival on Planet Earth, as pollinators and recyclers. Edward Osborne Wilson, a leading American biologist, stated in one of his articles that “If insects were to vanish, so would nearly all flowering plants and the food webs they support. This loss, in turn, would cause the extinction of reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals: in effect, nearly all terrestrial animal life. The disappearance of insects would also end rapid decomposition of organic matter and thus shut down nutrient cycling. Humans would be unable to survive.”

Especially in the case of bees, public opinion has changed in recent years and their importance in food production has sparked warnings about the indiscriminate use of poisons and pesticides around the world. But unlike nature, with its meanders and countless possibilities for resting places, our modern cities and buildings generally do not create adequate environments for insects, and even birds or other animals. The English company Green&Blue has been working on this and creating refuges to incorporate nature into our buildings. We spoke with them to better understand these products.

Bringing the weather inside is usually the opposite of what you want from a building envelope. However, new research from the University of Oregon, described in an article by The Washington Post, aims to show the physical and psychological benefits of letting nature inside. Signs of nature and change are both beneficial to our well-being, yet we don’t always have access to them when inside buildings—and humans are now spending 90% of our lives inside. But even in an urban setting, where nature may be hard to come by, there’s no escaping the weather. When researchers found ways to bring things like wind and dappled reflections of the sun inside, they found that exposure to these natural movements lowered heart rates, while being less distracting than similar artificially generated movements.

By now, green buildings are a familiar concept, but the article in The Washington Post proposes moving beyond green buildings as we know them today. While green building can be great in new construction, that excludes a lot of existing buildings that could and should also benefit from an intervention of nature. Ideally, buildings should actively demonstrate their relationship with nature, moving beyond simply “doing no harm.”

+ 3

Talking to the Louisiana Channel, Danish professor, sculptor, and artist Bjørn Nørgaard outlines the philosophy that underpins his work and reflects upon his architectural projects. Nørgaard describes in the film, a co-production with Munkeruphus, the strong influence of his mentor in the 1960s - German artist Joseph Beuys - whose theories formed a key part of Nørgaard's evolution and ethos as an artist. The concept of "die soziale Plastik", or social sculpture, would go on to shape Nørgaard's approach to architecture and other forms of art - its main philosophy being that every part of life can be approached creatively.

+ 4

Building in nature constitutes a contradiction, as architecture enables immersive access to the landscape, while at the same time, natural landmarks are being slowly engulfed by tourists. The human presence in natural landscapes is an interplay of scales, a juxtaposition of archetypal shelters against the vast sceneries, as well as a negotiation between access to the landscape and environmental conservation. Exploring a variety of attitudes and formal strategies, the following takes a look at what could be learned from the experiences and design philosophies of several architects and practices that have perfected ways of addressing architecture in the landscape.

+ 7

+ 4

On September 8, 2019, Austrian’s largest public art installation to date opened to the public. Titled FOR FOREST – The Unending Attraction of Nature, the artwork transforms the Wörthersee Football Stadium in Klagenfurt into a native central European forest. Conceived by Swiss curator Klaus Littmann and inspired by a dystopian drawing by Austrian artist and architect Max Peintner, the installation advocates for pressing contemporary issues such as climate change and deforestation. Through the structural containment of this massive forest, it suggests that nature may someday only be found in specially designated spaces, as animals are today in zoos. Landscape architecture was supervised by Enea Landscape Architecture.