Is a Building Alive ...

... as active participant, rather than as a passive container for life?.

Back in 2016 at the first COST Restore training school in Lancashire, we held an open discussion on whether buildings could indeed be living, whether they are sentient or are just completely inert.

Notes made then and added to over the years in notebooks, writing and posts, have revisited this theme many times, as I did this weekend with a Guardian extract from Robert Macfarlane on his just published book ‘Is a River Alive’. In the first paragraph, he hits home with a comment that while we may not be able to comprehend what a living river would be, we almost certainly know what a dead river is.

And so it is with buildings - we may not fully feel what a living building is, should or could be - but we know and feel a dead building when we are in one. It is that difference between the buildings that Zap us with life, energy and feel-goodness compared to those buildings that just Sap our energy, drain our health and dumb any sense of feeling.

.. buildings as repositories of stories and memory... Mountain Bothy. MnB

We are in the process of rethinking sustainability leadership, rethinking education, rethinking built environment design, rethinking construction process for an ecological age. And importantly we are rethinking buildings and structures as healthy, living entities: as living buildings. FutuREstorative, RIBA, Martin Brown 2016

Following is my narrative, making sense of thoughts and notes from over the years on living (as in sentient) buildings, how we ‘feel’ living buildings and how we feel dead buildings, on how Living Building Challenge and Vastu Architecture come close to seeing buildings as sentient entities, fundamentally alive and conscious, on writers through the ages that have articulated such feelings that aid our understanding, from Aristotle and ‘amina’ via Stuart Brand, William Wordsworth, Satish Kumar, Christopher Alexander, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin, David Whyte and others.

In Vastu Shastra, buildings are conceived as fundamentally alive and conscious rather than inert structures. This ancient Indian architectural science views buildings as embodiments of the “Vastu Purusha” (a cosmic being) containing and conducting “prana” (life force) through their design and orientation.

The architecture responds to directional forces, seasonal changes, and celestial movements, while construction involves rituals acknowledging the building’s emerging consciousness. Materials are selected for their energetic properties rather than merely physical characteristics, creating spaces that don’t simply house human activities but participate in them through an ongoing energetic exchange. This living quality means buildings can actively nurture or hinder the spiritual, mental, and physical well-being of occupants depending on how successfully they embody proper Vastu principles.

The Living Building Challenge approaches buildings as sentient entities through regenerative design that treats structures as integrated, living participants in their ecosystems rather than static objects. What attracted me to the LBC many years ago was the underyoing philosphy from Jason McLenllan that we are not occupants of buildings, but inhabitants within living systems.

As a certification system, LBC requires buildings to function like organisms (a flower) and respond dynamically with their environment. . By mandating net-positive impacts for energy and water, prohibiting toxic materials, and requiring biophilic elements that connect occupants to natural systems, the Challenge cultivates buildings that actively participate in ecological processes rather than depleting them. The inclusion of Beauty and Biophilia, as a mandatory element reflects the belief that truly living buildings must nourish the human spirit and establish emotional relationships with occupants, acknowledging that sentience in architecture extends beyond functional performance to include the building’s capacity to inspire wonder and enable meaningful connections with both inhabitants and place.

I think of Morwenna, a bronze age elder and sage in my forthcoming ‘Five Autumns Through Time’ book, passing though our village in 2200BC. Morwenna would have seen buildings and shelters not as constructions but as collaborations with a living world.

For her, the very concept of designing or building would be foreign, she would instead see herself as enabling the emergence of living structures through deep listening, to materials, place, and ancestral wisdom, creating dwellings that remain alive to their purpose and embedded in the living landscape. (Something that echoes through the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer today)

In classical philosophy “anima” spoke to the soul or life force that animates life. Aristotle distinguished between vegetative souls (in plants), sensitive souls (in animals), and rational souls (in humans). This then raises the question (at least for me) of not only ‘Are buildings sentient?’ but also ‘Could buildings have a soul?’ ....

William Wordsworth

I am fascinated with the transition to the Romantic era, particularly Wordsworth. Here was a transition in thinking and perspectives on nature in the late 1700s that strongly resonates with the transition we are undergoing today, seeking new meaning as we shift from sustainability to regenerative and all that entails.

A walk this week, that helped shape this post, walking on the path that Wordsworth and Emerson discussed and formulate philosophical and poetic writings, links me back into that transition.

The Romantic movement emerged as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and industrialisation, just as today's regenerative movement responds to the limitations of mechanical, carbon efficiency-focused sustainability approaches.

My walk took me up Blind Tarn Ghyll and on to the fells. Blind Tarn Cottage here was home to the Green family and described by Wordsworth as if it had ‘grown out of the mountain, an indigenous dwelling for indigenous inhabitants’

Wordsworth’s poetry often attributes a consciousness to homes. Across his poems he sees simple rural dwellings as repositories of human emotion and memory. For Wordsworth, buildings, especially humble cottages such as Blind Tarn, become imbued with the lives lived within them, a living presence that transcends any physical structure. His notion of buildings are as active participants in human emotional life rather than passive containers. And this at the turn of the 18th century.

Watercolour ‘plein air’ sketch, looking to Silver Howe and beyond. MnB 29/4

Christopher Alexander

Alexander stands out as the prominent thinker who wrote about living or sentience as applied to buildings and architecture. In “The Nature of Order” he developed the concept of the “living structure” and argued that buildings can possess varying degrees of life or wholeness. He proposed great architecture has a quality of aliveness and that buildings can actually be living entities in a meaningful sense, suggesting that buildings can feel more whole, harmonious, and connected to human experience.

Roger Deakin

Having spent Easter in Suffolk, I am once again dipping into Roger Deakins Notes from Walnut Tree Farm. Deakin explored the living quality of wooden structures. He saw timber buildings as retaining the spirit of their source tree, creating a continuity between forest and human dwelling. His experience living in a wooden home led him to perceive it as a living entity that “breathed” with the seasons and weather.

For Deakin, wooden buildings maintained an animate quality, expanding, contracting, and responding to their environment much like living organisms. He wrote about wood as having ‘memory and character’ - not just as a building material - but with each use and reuse a ‘new existence, a metamorphosis into new life’ Something we are now seeing as upcycling.

Robert Macfarlane

In “The Old Ways” and “Landmarks,” Macfarlane noted how buildings become imbued with consciousness through human interaction and natural processes. Like many writers, he describes old buildings as repositories of stories and memory, suggesting they develop a kind of sentience through accumulating human experience. Macfarlane often portrays rural and aged shelters, like bothies and stone huts, as ‘beings’ that have developed personalities through centuries of weathering and human use, becoming “thinking entities” that shape the experiences of those who live within them.

Stewart Brand

In “How Buildings Learn,” Brand addresses buildings as living, evolving entities. His central thesis is that buildings aren’t static objects but adaptive organisms that “learn” over time. Brand writes: “Buildings are not primarily art, nor primarily symbols, nor primarily containers ... They are changing organisms shaped by cultural evolution, by their inhabitants, and by the city around them.” He sees buildings as developing intelligence through adaptation to human needs, suggesting that the most successful buildings are those with the capacity to “learn” and evolve.

Satish Kumar

In his ecological writings such as Soul Soil and Society and work, Kumar talks of shelter, and approaches buildings from a deeply spiritual perspective. He applies principles of reverential ecology to architecture, seeing buildings as participants in the sacred web of life. Kumar advocates for structures built with natural materials that maintain connection to their origins, suggesting that such buildings retain an inherent consciousness. He views true shelter as something that nurtures both body and spirit, proposing that buildings constructed with mindfulness become living entities that participate in the spiritual growth of their inhabitants.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

In Braiding Sweetgrass RWK highlights how the Potawatomi language (and like many other Indigenous languages) doesn’t divide the world into “animate” and “inanimate” objects the way English does. Many things that Western languages would classify as objects or inanimate things, like rocks, mountains, water, and plants, are referred to with the same grammatical sense used for living beings. This grammatical structure acknowledges them, with verbs and not nouns, as beings with agency, spirit, and personhood rather than as mere objects.

Kimmerer writes on indigenous perspectives on homes and buildings. She describes traditional structures as living entities made from gifts freely given by plants and animals, maintaining their animate nature even in structural form. For Kimmerer, a properly made shelter acknowledges and honors the life force of its materials. She suggests that buildings constructed with gratitude and reciprocity maintain their connection to the living world, creating dwellings that are participants in, rather than separate from, ‘the community of life’.

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An attempt to articulate that feeling we get when in a living and in a dead building:

Living Buildings Zap us with life and feel ...

Responsive - acknowledging presence and interacting with movements, adjusting to season, light, and weather in ways that feel intentional and natural, rather than mechanical.

Warm - Not just in temperature, but in the sense of welcome; they invite touch and physical connection through natural materials that age gracefully, developing patina rather than simply deteriorating.

Dynamic - There’s a sense of gentle, continuous change, floorboards that speak, windows that breathe, surfaces that reflect changing light in ways that feel like communication rather than mere physics.

Contextually rooted - They feel as though they’ve grown from their surroundings rather than being imposed upon the landscape, creating a seamless transition between inside and outside worlds.

Narrative rich - They hold stories in their physicality; marks, they wear patterns, adaptations can reveal a building’s history as if it were consciously preserving memories.

Nurturing - They actively support human flourishing rather than merely sheltering; spaces feel like they’re caring for occupants through thoughtful proportions and qualities of light.

Reciprocal - They are giving back more than they have taken and an active regenerator for all life

Dead Buildings Sap life and feel ...

Inert - They remain static regardless of occupation, season, or time; their responses feel mechanical rather than adaptive.

Alienating - Materials repel touch and connection, often feeling artificially consistent, without variation or evidence of natural processes.

Static - Changes occur as deterioration rather than evolution; they don’t adapt but simply decay or require maintenance to remain the same.

Imposed - They seem to sit upon rather than emerge from their context, creating hard boundaries between inside and outside that feel disconnected.

Anonymous - They resist personalisation and lack distinctive character, offering little evidence of their history or the lives they’ve contained.

Draining - They extract energy from occupants rather than supporting them; people often describe feeling exhausted after time in such spaces.

Degenerative - they have taken and continue to take more than giving back and contritue to the degeneration of life.

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How to conclude this, a synthesis of these notes would point to a need for living, rather than dead buildings, responsive rather than inert, part of our lives rather than disconnected containers for life, to zap health and live, not to sap and drain, to be regenerative, not degenerative.

And importantly to aid our reconnection with the living world.

Such an exploration of living versus dead buildings presents many implications for us in the built environment sector, challenging us to reconsider some fundamental aspects in our work. It is a dichotomy that challenges us to develop more intimate relationships with each and every material in corporated, understanding them not as inert substances but as entities with their own properties, histories, and voices.

Perhaps more fundamentally, it is a perspective that challenges us to reimagine our identity, from designers and constructors of objects to cultivators of living processes, becoming responsible for nurturing relationships between building, inhabitants, and place. And, in doing so, enabling restoration of all living systems to return to a healthy state and the conditions to thrive.

These are the regenerative questions and conversations we need to hold and surface, what David Whyte refers to as conversational inspiration through courageous conversations.

Zoom Regenerative over the last five years has explored many of the themes in conversation and is currently exploring the soul in the built environment. The next is on May 20th.