Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection

Description

I had hoped that Kellert would explore all the different ways that Biophilia might interact with the environmental design process with a view to uncovering new possibilities both in the built AND conceptual stages. Unfortunately the book just slowly scoops an uninspired selection of well-trodden sustainable practices into the Biophilia fold. I'm afraid I feel that the book is written too much in the cautious, repetitive & tautological style of Academic Sociology and is unable to take any vigorous conceptual jumps into new territory. The point of such leaps is to make connections with reasonably well-founded research in another field with a view to invigorating understanding (and design) on both sides of the jump. Kellert's association with Edward O. Wilson had led me to expect such daring, which drives every wonderful page of the latter's masterful "Consilience". Hildebrand's "origins of architectural pleasure" does at least bravely gather together many fields of study to create a new benchmark for linking basic epigenetic rules of human nature with architecture. I am hoping for a book that looks around for ways that architecture may explore the positive (rather than remedial) use of human nature in design. Maybe Kellert can write volume two in a more consistently pioneering form.