Beyond Passive House: The Nature Connection | Tom Bassett-Dilley | TEDxRushU

it's great to be here speaking on this theme as an architect of seizing the future because the future has a really special place for Architects the buildings that I designed today are going to be around for a long time maybe centuries if I'm lucky and well if I design well I'm lucky and so the more clear and uh powerful the more positive and clear that vision of the future is the better I can build my buildings today to make that better uh future world come about and so I want to share with you today a kind of vision of that future that I would like my buildings to contribute to I've always had a sense of mission about architecture and um when I started my practice about 10 years ago I knew I would focus on sustainability and I got very quickly to to the point of realizing that Energy Efficiency was something I should focus on because energy affects climate change it affects pollution which affects environmental and human health it affects political stability around the globe and it's one of the most uh powerful things we can do as Architects because energy is primarily consumed in buildings so I went to the passive house Institute United States and I got training in the building science and the design strategies and the energy modeling to figure out to learn how to design the most energy efficient buildings in the world and this chart here kind of shows a comparison between old buildings uh to built to code buildings that's what the code requires down to passive house buildings you see it's about a 10 times reduction in Heating and Cooling energy and about a 75% reduction in energy overall so it's a big deal and this is done before we start putting on the technology like photovoltaics or geothermal um wind power these are these are things that have their place but the beauty of the passive approach is that the part of the building that remains um is saving energy by virtue of design and craftsmanship all along and I'm proud to have designed the first certified passive house buildings to be built in the Chicago area but I began to ask myself if it's enough energy efficiency because in the end it's really about doing less harm but I started asking myself how do we design buildings that actually do good for us uh in terms of our health and our happiness and not just doing less harm and so in other words if Energy Efficiency is what we need to survive what do we need in the built environment to thrive and I think the place to look for an answer to a question like that is in the very distant past and how the environment through Evolution has shaped us as a species and so I'm going all the way back to the very beginning the first hominids coming down onto the Savannah and uh living as Hunter gathers around a million years ago and uh this is the world that that that we I'll say experienced um modern Homo sapiens comes on at the scene about 100,000 years ago and so you're looking at an enormous amount of time that we were imprinting ourselves upon this landscape upon nature as we call it now then it was just the world right it was the neighborhood it was the grocery store the hardware store the dating site it was it was everything you know and uh now we have uh we've built a separation so anyway moving through this landscape and these textures of plant and uh animal leaf and nut we had to discern through understanding of nature patterns what would make us Thrive so we get to Modern agriculture at about 10,000 years ago and we start living in cities we start settling and it's only in the last 100 years that we have sort of changed the tables from being uh turn the tables from being that one animal living out in the world with all the other animals to a dominant species that has constructed an environment that we live in that is actually separate from the natural world so sort of of a new phenomenon and uh we if we look at this put this into perspective look at the 24-hour day of uh look at look at the million years of human evolution as a 24-hour day we're talking about the last 8.6 seconds and for those other 23 hours in 59 minutes and 51 seconds we were living outside so it gave us a kind of uh it Formed our genome and our our genome is expecting this kind of input from the environment that we're not giving it so what is that doing to us well um if we look at it just in in those last 100 years we see an amazing migration from rural to Urban this is this is worldwide we're looking at 1900 about less than 25% of the population living in cities and we go to 1950 we're about a little over 25% 2000 almost 50% we've just crossed this year into the majority of people live in cities not in the country and it's projected that by 2100 we turn the tables en entirely the opposite way so that less than 25% of the world's population will live outside of cities now there's nothing inherently wrong with cities this is where our culture thrives our science our technology this is all critical about who we are as a species also but we have to think about what signals we're getting from that environment that we've created and how we can shape that environment to so that we can uh Thrive so in other words to put it in perspective this was going for a drink 100,000 years ago and and it could be this today I'm going to drive down and get a plastic bottle at 7-Eleven and so you have to ask yourself are we missing something you know we might be missing something in the environment here that will make us happy and healthy and there's been a great uh field of study in the last few years especially um about how our exposure to the natural world uh can help our health and how lack of exposure to the natural world can be detrimental to our health and this body of knowledge um you're looking at like stress response and and and blood uh lipid or or blood pressure emotional response psychological response has been fueling a emerging field called biophilic design and I want to talk about the principles of biophilic design in a kind of condensed form it's a it's sort of a big and emerging field I want to kind of simplify a little bit to sort of give the the flavor of it and show it how in in a building how kind of put to use so the principles are really um kind of intuitive and obvious I mean we all know it's nicer to look at a Gard than a machine typically there are some really great machines actually but but uh so so principle number one is Visual and non-visual connection to Nature now this is Frankl Wright um falling water in Pennsylvania if you haven't gone there go it's fantastic uh it's a beautiful U embodiment of visual and non-visual connection to Nature we want to be in an environment where we can see the natural world things that are alive things that are well and we want to hear it as well so here you put the the the house over the waterfall you can hear the water some might think it's a little too much my wife for instance um uh she says it has to make her go to the bathroom but um um anyway but but but for me it's perfect um and you're seeing the movement of the trees you see the movement of the birds um and so it it it's uh it's it's creating this environment that's that's the building is part of um now what I've put here in red are some of the the specific things that some of the scientific research has has shown about for instance this Visual and nonvisual connection lower stress hormones improves attentiveness and happiness uh number two in related to that is having natural materials and biomorphic forms in our environments um this again seems kind of uh intuitive obvious as well we like natural wood we like Stone we like the shape of trees plants uh animals Etc the human form um but a lot of our environments U this room is a pretty good example are fairly devoid of biomorphic forms um the the the oak there is about it aside from the um the plant in the flower arrangement in the back of the room and I could really use some stress lowering hormones right um but anyway so it can be very abstract you think of the stained glass patterns of Frankl right it can be very literal uh art nuuvo but we we key at an instinctive almost level to those to those forms and patterns they help our blood pressure increase our sense of comfort then we have complexity in order and non-rhythmic sensory stimuli this is a more subtle thing but uh basically we want the we want the environment to be legible we want to understand it but we don't want it to be so ordered that it's boring because a really non-dynamic environment starts to shut us down if it's totally steady state our senses lose contact with that world we want to hear the bird song we want to hear the movement of the wind in the trees we want to hear the water moving these are the kind of non-rhythmic sensory stimuli that help our lower stress response again so um finally uh Prospect and refuge with moments of mystery and risk this is really rich stuff for an architect because it's about how we put ourselves in space and what's really fascinating about this is that uh there have been some some great studies on this and a book written by a guy named Dennis Dutton it's called the art Instinct and he actually did a Ted Talk on it in which he asked the question are we hardwired for Beauty and the answer is he says yes and here's why what we have looked for over those hundreds of thousands of years of evolution is an environment in which we can observe a savannah a landscape that is lifegiving to us we want to see presence of water we want to see diverse Greenery uh evident animal life and we want to see it as a navigable pathway so it's not a dense forest we can't see in we want to we need a little more sense of ownership of that landscape we want to see it from a raised position but we want that position to have Refuge we need to have trees that we can climb up in or something we can hide in uh something at our back so it's this Yin Andy kind of environmental um balance that we're looking for and we patterned this this is these are the these are the the places we selected in the landscape and we feel good when we have that in our houses in our workplaces in our in our environments that we inhabit this is a screen porch on a house we did a year ago um it's just the the view is not the Savannah but it's a sense of Prospect and refuge um so that's very condensed if you're really interested in this I would suggest you look at the T and bright green paper 14 patterns of biophilia it's they go into great detail and and more detail and they cite all the scientific works that are supporting these patterns so it's a great resource um I didn't have time to go into all of it but I want to give you an overview and I have a bibliography by the way that at the end if you're interested in I can uh I can share with you um also international living future Institute has case studies on their living building challenge site you can see some of these things built in larger buildings larger sites but I wanted to show uh an example of a small house um this is a 30t x 126t lot in Oak Park we're in design on this hopefully going to construction next year and it's a passive house which is uh embodying biophilic elements and I want to just quickly show how some of these principles um happen here so uh first of all as passive house we want to be oriented towards the environment in such a way that we can use sun to our advantage passive house is like passive solar it has elements of that but it primarily looks at keeping energy in the building via insulation and air tightness so when we uh think of the building going on the site I like to think of it like an animal this is putting both the performance together with the biomorphic so I think of this big animal coming out of the site to settle in for a nap and it wants to put it it's what I've designed as sort of a metal exoskeleton to the north the cold North Wind where there's no sunlight and open up its warm underbelly to the South where it can get sun and it can get sun in the winter time that's the winter stulis on the on the left and summer stulis on the right so it needs to be shaded so to not drive up those energy bills and create overheating and glare L and discomfort in the summertime and what we've done here with the shading uh strategy is create small shading overhangs down lower so that we can grow plants up it and so when we talk about that sort of nestling into the site of this of this animal of a building um it can be done with vines that bring animals and and plants to the building and so we have this sense of looking out through something that's supporting life it's not just all on the inside it's not just all on the outside so anyway principle number one uh for biomorphic design is that natural that Visual and non-visual connection to Nature and this is something we all know I mean a house should have a garden and it should be a nice Garden I think this is something we're we're sort of hardware for but here the idea is to take it a little farther and to say how can we create a microcosm of that that Primal Savannah experience and so in our climate here in Oak Park or here in in the Chicago region we can create a prairie landscape uh very easily and we put put water in it we put native plants in it we provide shelter and food for birds and other habitat and we start to create this web of life that the more of these that get done the the stronger it is so um talking about water for a moment as one of the natural materials this is a good example of sort of efficiency and and biophilic Design coming together the water comes off of the roof and instead of sending it to a storm system where it goes eventually to a sewer to get use a lot of energy to get treated you put it into the landscape so we've designed these sort of dry creek beds that will take it to rain Gardens where it can infiltrate back into the groundwater in the meantime creating a beautiful thing to look at that provides life for other species so the more we can get other species to thrive the more we Thrive that's the kind of the beauty of this is that it's not us or them you know we don't win this game unless everybody wins so um these uh arrows here kind of show these these connections Visual and non-visual by being able to hear and see and smell uh this this landscape around us um the building's raised a little bit off the ground so we get that sense of Overlook but not so much you feel disconnected from the landscape and then by being able to capture the sky view in the middle of the house where the space opens up we get that Prospect to the sky as well it's really important I've always loved growing up in the midwest the the changing sky and it's a it's a comforting thing to kind of know what weather is coming your way since it changes so much living in La was like you know it's just it's blue it's blue it's blue it's blue oh there's fog oh my God there's fog um so that's Prospect but what about Refuge how do we feel secure this is a small Urban site how do we make it feel like we can look out to that landscape but not to feel like we're just exposing ourselves in a way that we feel uh sort of again primally uncomfortable and this is where those shading mechanisms that turn into vertical trellises start to do double duty because when you put a screen relatively close to yourself like a traditional uh m window with small panes um when you're standing up close to it it's easy to see out but from a distance it becomes a plane that you can't see beyond so it's a nice kind of optical effect of smaller denser patterns closer to the building so it allows us to create as interstitial spaces between inside and outside that allow us to have privacy and a sense of space that we can Garden in or in the backyard we can have a screen porch that we can sit and the rain can be falling on the roof over the green roof over our heads and we can be enjoying dinner with our kids and and what have you and seeing the garden being there so biophilic design is not going to make it where we can just stay indoors all the time and just be perfect we still need to work into our uh into our daily lives and into our buildings a way to get us outside and so that's part of the that's part of the message as well um inside uh the idea is to try to create this this sense of biomorphic form the image here in this house is of a Forest Clearing again drawing on that native landscape uh we had Oak savanas around here and and a lot of dense forest not far from our prairies and so the idea of sort of discovery of a special magical place like that is a is a moment that the family can kind of galvanize around it's in the center of the house where the kitchen is and so the idea is the beams The Columns from up below from down below rise up create this sense of forest canopy and um light comes in from above over these planters that we have herbs and flowers growing in so we get dappled light diffusing in through that and try to create on the inside of a building a sense of what it's like when you're outside the variety of spaces and the variety of materials tactile materials that we can that we can relate to and and comfort us so um air flow is controlled by uh a ventilation system bringing uh fresh air in all the time it's a heat recovery ventilation system this is a a classic element of a passive house we need to have fresh air that's a direct physical connection to the outside world um but it needs to be done with heat recovery so it's efficient um in addition to that there's some nice sort of low Tech devices let the building operate like an organic hole so we have thermostatically controlled fans that when we see the temperature is different enough between levels they'll kick on let that M let that air come down mix rise back up all the while being fed by that fresh air ventilation system and then there's a new some new lighting um products on the market there's one called stack lighting there's one called Philips Hue system these are programmable bulbs that let you um program them to change their LEDs that have different colors in them so they you can program them for different colors and brightness at different time of day so our circadian rhythm is set by exposure to Daylight when it's you know bright out and dim light at night so we can program these bulbs to go to dimmer yellower light in the evening time at Sunset so it's a really nice thing I I have this on my computer screen as well it's an app called flux and when it's Sunset it yellows down and you kind of go oh it's Sunset you know so it puts you in touch with that with that Rhythm the world so this is one house um it's a link in a chain and so the longer and stronger that chain the more we look at transforming the environment for everybody but this idea of biophilic design scales up wonderfully well and again those uh living building challenge case studies are some good examples of that but think of this in well a conference center um think of it in a a library a city street a Public Square and that our day-to-day experience of life is is not sort of uh either or either we're out in the woods or we're in the city I mean that's kind of how I feel when I live I love walking in the woods I join the Arboretum so I can go there all the time but why isn't that in my why isn't that in my neighborhood so I want to talk about transformative change really quickly in the last few slides this is Chicago region 1900 this a USGS map you can download these it's great love Maps I added the green just to sort of illustrate what happens between then and almost 100 years later when we basically covered it all and so this is not to say Woe Is Us we're stuck with this this is to say look at the kind of change that we're capable with that was the last century so the question is where are we going to go forward in the next century and we have to have a vision about what we want how we want to live is this the right balance or should we do better how can we do better so I'm going to ask you for dream with me just for a minute on my kind of fantasy um parallel universe this is not my my plan for Chicago I know this isn't going to happen individuals don't design cities cultures do but it's a it's a a way for me to sort of think about what would a city look like with a whole different set of priorities if you prioritized ecology as much as Commerce and you wanted to put every citizen with a short walking distance to open lands so so here's what I did I said let's start with the waterways being sacran you have to have no City can be within a mile of the displan River or the Chicago river or lake Michigan what if because then all the water coming off the city could INF filtrate could percolate and do what bioses do which is clean that water and let it go to its uh to its Watershed in the process of course that's where the wetlands are and that's where a tremendous amount of Life can form um and so those buffer zones are open lands where we can all walk and soak in animals and it's a it's like a even again that yinyang thing it's sort of even City to open land um now that means that we have this dense Urban fabric this sort of vital City in the midst of this and if it forms in kind of a linear fashion that makes circulation really easy if these are let's say Road and Rail lines you could raise them over the open land so that uh deer or bison could walk from the displan river to Lake Michigan without becoming roadkill people could walk freely on the ground plane and and then the perimeter between City and open land could be a a immediated intermediate space of of parks of Community Gardens that's sort of intermediat between City an open space but a place that people can cultivate and enjoy um my nod to to Rob uh this is my farm Zone and that's my Distribution Center so um anyway the question is you know not is rapid change going to happen but what do we do with it how do we look forward to the next century and think about what that vision is going to be we deserve to thrive as a species not merely survive but we need to kind of get a vision of that and and work toward it and biof design provides us with the tools to make that Vision reality thank [Applause] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 106,687

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Design, Architecture, Sustainability

Id: 1Ab9HUmQw44

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Thu May 19 2016