“THIS SECTION was made a bit difficult to find,” Professor Raymond De Young tells his students.
“That’s on purpose.”
He’s right. I’ve been attending classes daily in the building across the street for more than a year, and even worked in the adjacent children’s hospital, without ever knowing this wing existed.
This unit of the University of Michigan Health System is the Frankel Cardiovascular Center (CVC), which connects to the main hospital building by a second-floor walkway. The bridge overlooks a hilly lawn paved with trails that meander around hedges with clean lines and patches of annuals, hand-selected to attract butterflies to their colors. The glass holds the sun’s heat when it hits, so pedestrians on the sky bridge move through warm rays as they cross, watching the landscape through transparent walls.
The polished floor of the bridge extends into a circular annex encased in glass, sprawling with trees, climbers, and palms that shade us like little figurines in a giant terrarium. Leaves reflect hunter green and pale gold in shifting patterns as the sunlight washes them. The thickest vegetation concentrates at the center and outer edges of the atrium, leaving an inner ring clear for walking and watching. The slow sound of trickling water emerges as you approach the indoor garden, though the fountain itself is obscured by surrounding foliage, giving off a tropical illusion. De Young points out specific aspects of the extension to ground us in the introductory course, which focuses on built environments and their influence on human well-being.
“Students may want to come here and hang out or study,” he says, “but it won’t be long before you’re asked to leave. This was built specifically for patients’ reflection.”
In ecopsychology, preferred environments refer to those that speak to the evolution of our species. Early primates climbed tall trees to evade predators and sought haven in the underbrush, which may have led to a subconscious association between green and safety. Theorists of environmental preference connect our tree-dwelling history to a related theory of “prospect refuge”: that prospect, the ability to look forward and beyond, and refuge, the ability to see without being seen, aided our ancestors’ survival. Though most of us have lost our hunter-gatherer ways, our human instincts still prefer environments with these protective characteristics.
These theories are built into the design of the CVC atrium. Such densely packed greenery obscures other attributes of the indoor garden from the outside, like the scattered benches and bistro sets, tucked out of sight along with their occupants. Beyond associating a sense of enclosure with security, environmental preference theory also dictates that too much openness can erase the mystery and complexity we need to quench our thirst for exploration and discovery. We gravitate to that which
