Essay

Micro-Lecture Introduction

How can your design amplify the benefits of nature? In this Micro-Lecture you will learn important paths to begin your journey of learning from nature at deeper levels…to then inject what you find into your architectural designs.

Lecture Transcript

00:01 Maria Lorena Lehman: How can your architectural design amplify the benefits of nature? I’m Maria Lorena Lehman, Founder of Sensing Architecture, and in this micro lecture we’re going to explore how you can learn from nature to integrate what you learned back into your architectural designs to uplift quality of life for your building occupants. It may help you to learn from healing gardens or gardens that have been designed for multi-sensory perception. You see, gardens target the five classical senses: The sense of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and even taste. By learning from healing gardens, you can learn to create architectural illusions or create architectural effects that help occupants when and how they need help most, whether that means helping to solve for an immediate need or helping to prompt progress toward reaching a desired goal.

01:13 MLL: Also, with new technologies being integrated into architecture today, you can use technologies like augmented reality or virtual reality to simulate nature or to extract what nature reveals. Using neuro-aesthetic principles you can begin to extract from nature, to pull those beautiful patterns that we universally, neuro-scientifically find to be most satisfactory and fulfilling as people that perceive them. So we can pull from nature in these ways to incorporate this into our architecture.

02:01 MLL: So, how can you amplify the benefits that nature brings? Begin by studying the benefits of nature. Bring that back into your architectural designs so that your architecture extends beyond the visual sense, so that it too can become multi-sensory. This will ensure that it uplifts quality of life for occupants, because it will engage with them in new and innovative ways.