088 BIOPHILIA


BIOPHILIA IS the innate human instinct to connect with nature and other planetary beings – everything from plants, insects, animals and fish, to lakes and mountains, whose rights to ‘personhood’ have become a major platform for ecological protests. However, when the term first emerged in the design and architecture community around 2010, it was at the forefront of a whole speculative movement that saw designers trying to mimic the look, feel, patterning and textures of nature, borrowing from its innate engineering genius – usually for the purposes of aesthetics or


performance, or both. Examples include Michael Pawlyn’s Sahara Forest Project for the Qatari government – greenhouses that copy the contours and behaviors of Namibian beetle wings in order to harvest the morning dew – and Tonkin Liu’s wonderfully innovative shell lace structure which uses the geometries of nature to provide greater strength with less material – deployed already in bridges and most recently in their marvelous Tower of Light clean energy station in Manchester. However, neither these projects nor their contemporaneous inventions contribute to an


appreciation of our role within the wider planetary ecology. Te spotlight was still – as per the prevailing 20th century norm – very much on human ingenuity, or science, design and engineering harnessed for our own delight or benefit. It feels almost foolish to say so now, but it seems we felt then that technology could hold the answer to the perils we have inflicted on our planet.


In 2022/2023, the mood is very different; I doubt that anyone imagines that the forces of technology will reverse the harm we have done so far with our fossil-fuel intensive, extractive


ALL IMAGES: RORY GARDINER


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