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The Principal’s Corner  They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Human beings perceive beauty in different ways through culture, memory, experience, and need. But beauty is not only subjective. In the natural world and across life, beauty can be understood as something more fundamental: an expression of relationship, pattern, function, and structure. What once seemed mysterious or ephemeral about beauty can increasingly be understood as integral to nature itself. Take a butterfly’s wing. Its color, shimmer, and seeming delicacy are not decorative. They arise from the form and texture of the wing itself, from microscopic structures interacting with light. What we experience as beautiful is often evidence that life is working well, that form and purpose have evolved together over time. I didn’t arrive at this understanding through science or philosophy first. I arrived at it through lived experience, by returning again and again to a place where beauty, function, memory, and belonging were inseparable for me. My deepest connection to the natural world was, and in many ways still is, at our family cabin in New Hampshire. My maternal grandparents, immigrants from Romania and Ukraine, lived modestly in New York City. During the Depression, my grandfather acquired an acre of land through logging work. That acre became more meaningful to our family than anyone could have imagined. This year marks 100 years of our family stewarding that place. As a kid in those woods, I would sit and watch leaves moving in the wind, stop and listen to water slipping over stones in the nearby creek, examine rocks and wonder how they were made, or stare at light shifting through the trees. Long before I had the language for it, I was drawn to the quiet intelligence of the natural world and to the way its beauty was never separate from how it lived and worked. Before I knew the word, I was already experiencing biophilia. Looking back, I can see how much those summers shaped me. The rocks, the water, the trees, the air, the granite-filled earth, and our relationship to that place helped form the foundation of how I think about the built environment. What drew me in was never beauty alone. It was the realization that beauty and function are not separate, and that design at its best can become a meeting place between the environment, society, art, science, and care. Seeing the Big Picture  Too often, beauty in the built environment gets treated like an extra. Something applied at the end. A finish. A style. A luxury. Beauty in life isn't aesthetic or superficial, it's the result of something useful for an organism, there is a reason behind it. Pattern, texture, structure, variation, rhythm, diffraction of light all have a use. Those patterns help species and systems perform and thrive. Helping attract pollinators, regulate heat, guide movement, communicate health, maturity, resilience, and attract a mate. What we experience as beautiful is often a sign that things are working well. Beauty feels great to us because its roots tell that story of harmony. The recognition of this is an ancient instinct in us, stretching back to before we could call ourselves human. An ancient part of us knows we belong to the environment around us, we came from it and will return to it. According to biologist E. O. Wilson this innate and genetically determined affinity of human beings with the natural world is called biophilia or - love of life. Biophilic design is the practice of weaving nature into the built environment and involving nature in the spaces as if it were a stakeholder. It is not about adding plants to a room or borrowing a natural pattern for wallpaper. It is about creating spaces that support human well-being by reconnecting us with the qualities of living systems, qualities that have deep purpose. We organize these into patterns like refuge, prospect, complexity and order and more. Learn about the patterns of biophilia in design here.  Beauty is more than aesthetic, it is the visible or sensory expression of things working well together. It can reveal the relationship between form and need, material and environment, structure and use. What we perceive as beautiful is often not arbitrary decoration, but a sign of relationship, adaptation, and integrity. Aesthetics alone can be superficial and certainly subjective. Beauty, at its fullest, is relational. It is not just how something looks, but how it performs, how it feels, how it ages, how it belongs, and what kinds of life it supports. Beauty has depth when it emerges from proportion, pattern, material integrity, and responsiveness to place. Here is where emergence comes in. In nature, complex beauty often arises from simple rules repeated. Branching patterns. Layered edges. Shifting light. Material variation. Feedback between organism and environment. The result is not random. It is alive, responsive, and coherent. Emergence is the unpredictable eventuality of wholes that become more than their constituent parts. My favorite example is how life is an emergent property of chemistry. From atom to molecule to cell to tissue to organ to animal.  The built environment can learn from emergence. When we design with clear principles rooted in place, people and ecology, beauty arises and becomes more than an aesthetic choice. It becomes an outcome of alignment. The Thread That Binds: Beauty and Function One of the cultural lessons nature offers is that simple rules create complex beauty. A leaf, a shell, a stream bed, or a grove of trees does not become beautiful because someone decorated it. Beauty emerges through relationship, adaptation, repetition, and response to context. There is form, but there is also a natural intelligence. There is delight, but also performance. The same should be true in our buildings and sites.  Beauty in the built environment is not about making things look expensive or polished. It is about creating places that feel deeply human, rooted, and life-giving. Places where light is considered. Where materials age with dignity and are made with integrity. Where circulation feels intuitive. Where people can gather, rest, focus, and belong. Where a building helps us feel more connected to ourselves, each other, and the living world around us. Function, in this context, is more than efficiency. It is the work something does in relation to life. In nature, function includes attracting pollinators, regulating heat, guiding movement, shedding water, signaling health, adapting to context, and supporting survival over time. In buildings and places, function includes helping people orient themselves, feel calm, gather, rest, focus, belong, and care for what surrounds them. When those moments in the built environment are treated with care, they aid in our connection with the place and the health of the people using it.  What This Looks Like in Practice at Tikun At Tikun, we believe beauty and function should never be in conflict or traded away as ‘value engineering’. The most compelling places work better because they are beautiful, and they feel more beautiful because they are functioning thoughtfully. That kind of beauty is relational. It can help build trust. It can support care. It helps a place matter. What this means is that beauty should not be treated as an optional layer that gets stripped away when budgets tighten, and function should not be reduced to mere efficiency or lowest cost. A place is successful when it supports real life: helping people feel oriented, welcome, calm, connected, and cared for.  Beauty is part of that work. It can make a place easier to understand, more dignified to inhabit, and more worthy of attention. We believe beauty is part of performance. In our work, biophilia is not a layer we add at the end; it shapes the questions we ask from the beginning.
These are not abstract questions. They influence planning, massing, materials, gathering spaces, circulation, views, and long-term use. They help us move beyond sterile efficiency or image-driven design toward something more grounded and enduring. Case Study  The Frick Environmental Center, in Pittsburgh, is a Living Building dedicated to experiential environmental education and acts as a gateway to a 644-acre public park. It’s free and open to the public. The Frick is a compelling case study in biophilia because it treats connection to nature as the foundation of the project, not an added layer. As a public gateway to Frick Park and a place for hands-on environmental education, it shows how beauty, learning, ecology, and stewardship can work together to create a place that feels both restorative and deeply purposeful. Learn more here. An Invitation  If you’re working on a project and trying to bring beauty, function, ecology, and community care into stronger relationship, we’d love to talk. Whether you’re imagining something new, rethinking an existing place, or trying to build a stronger foundation before design begins, we help teams shape places that feel grounded, life-giving, and built to last.
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