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What If Our Buildings Were Like Trees?

METROPOLIS’s Winter 2024 issue highlights how architects and designers are thinking about sustainability today.

By: Avinash Rajagopal

“What if our homes and workplaces were like trees, living organisms participating productively in their surroundings?” asked William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their 2002 essay “Buildings like Trees, Cities like Forests” (The Catalog of the Future, Pearson Press). “In short, a life-support system in harmony with energy flows, human souls, and other living things. Hardly a machine at all.”

It’s a powerful idea—that the things we human beings make should work as similarly as possible to the things nature has evolved. Emulating nature is a big part of how we think about sustainability today, since it motivates us to the ideals of creating no waste, relying on the energy of the sun, and nurturing diversity. Inventors and innovators call this approach “biomimicry,” a term popularized by Janine Benyus’s eponymous 1997 book, and it is the progenitor of our current obsession with bio-everything (see “Help! We’re Drowning in Bio-Lingo”).

PDX’s tree-lined terminal designed by ZGF Architects is a marvel of material sourcing, modular construction, and biophilic design. Photo: Courtesy Stephen A. Miller

Some of us continue to believe that if something comes from nature and does what nature does, then it can’t possibly be bad. The catch, of course, is that “you don’t want to copy nature and harm it at the same time,” warns writer Audrey Gray. 

Now, ZGF’s addition to Portland International Airport is not a “building like a tree” in the sense that McDonough and Braungart imagined, even though it is made of lots of trees and has lots of trees inside it (“Forest to Frame: Why Portland’s Airport is a New Milestone for Mass Timber,”). What makes it special, as writer Brian Libby and senior editor Francisco Brown lay out, are the efforts of an extraordinary group of professionals with deep respect for all forms of life—the design team at ZGF, the biophilic design consultants at Terrapin Bright Green, the host of foresters and mill owners who supplied the timber, and many, many others. It takes gargantuan care and dedication on the part of a huge number of people to embody in a building even the smallest piece of nature’s magnificence.

The plantings, skylights, and other biophilic elements at PDX were carefully researched to reduce passenger stress and ease their travel experience. Photo: Courtesy Ema Peter

The professionals you will meet in the following pages are engaged in a similar effort at the vanguard of sustainable design, whether they be Latin and Central American architects finding new ways of “How Can Designers Listen to Water?” or the winners of the 2024 METROPOLIS Planet Positive Awards. 

As our planet completes another revolution around the sun, it’s a good time to thank them, and all of you, for continuing to push for a better built environment. It is grueling work, and there are so many details to hyperfocus on and get lost in. The only way to keep going is to remember why we strive—we want peaceful and harmonious life on earth. So, if you will indulge me with a last arboreal reference, we can’t afford to miss the forest for the trees.

Read every story from our 2024 Winter Issue:

Planet Positive Awards 2024

MORE FROM THE WINTER ISSUE

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