There are books that, through their pages, bring us back to nature: they sharpen our attention, slow down our gaze, and teach us to read patterns, cycles, and limits. In architecture and design, that reconnection is not sentimental: it is methodological. It involves moving from nature as an image (green, organic, decorative) to nature as a system (time, climate, matter, maintenance, networks, interdependence).
We encourage you to begin this journey back with the following selection of works, with which we propose a progressive route: first, relearn to look; then, transfer that look to how we inhabit; later, turn living into design learning; and finally, train the imagination with exercises, stories and even urban oddities.
Relearning to see: nature as a method
Before designing, perception must be recalibrated. This first station brings together books that function like lenses: they force you to observe patiently, to think in terms of continuity (not snapshots) and to recover wonder as a discipline.
- Walden or Life in the Woods | Henry David Thoreau
A classic that remains radical for a simple reason: he proposes that clarity comes from reducing. For the creative mind, it’s a lesson about focus, rhythm, and decision: removing noise so that the structure of thought (and the landscape) can emerge.
- Alexander von Humboldt’s incredible journey to the heart of nature | Andrea Wulf + Lilian Melcher
Humboldt embodies a modern sensibility: understanding nature as a network (climate, geology, vegetation, culture). It is relevant because it trains the systemic perspective that any serious project demands today: nothing is isolated; everything has consequences.
- Salvaje (magazine)
The magazine that wants to take us out into the countryside has value in its format: fragmentary, visual, contemporary reading, which turns the natural into culture (photography, chronicle, essay). It functions as an archive of atmospheres and narratives: a reserve of references that nourishes without imposing.
From territory to how we live: domestic ecology, consumption and limits
Looking at nature is also looking at the impact of our daily lives: surface area, energy, resources, habits. These titles shift the question from landscape to housing, objects, and consumption: what does it mean to inhabit without denying the planet?
- Us & our planet. This is how we live | Maisie Skidmore
A mapping of lifestyles that helps to visualise that sustainability is not a slogan: it is a set of concrete decisions (mobility, space, food, objects). Useful for designers because it connects material culture and responsibility.
- How much house do we need? | Urs Peter Flueckiger
An uncomfortable (and therefore necessary) question: size as ideology. The book is relevant because it highlights the link between square meters, resources, and real well-being, and encourages us to think about spatial quality, not accumulation.
This issue of the specialised magazine DOMUS talks about plants not as decoration, but as agents: microclimate, health, humidity, shade, narrative. This editorial perspective helps to move beyond “cosmetic green” and integrate vegetation as an active part of the spatial experience.
Translating the living into the project: biomimicry, material culture and design as learning
Here, nature ceases to be contemplation and becomes a tool. It’s not about copying organic forms, but rather learning from processes. This implies efficiency, adaptation, structure, repair, cycle. It is the stage where the lived experience enters the project as knowledge.
- The beauty of the everyday object | Soetsu Yanagi
An ethics of the common: beauty linked to use, material honesty, hands and time. Relevant to interior design and architecture because it shifts the value from novelty to the quiet quality of something well done.
- Nature Design: From Inspiration to Innovation | Barry Bergdoll / Philip Ursprung
A bridge between culture and technology: how nature has been a driving force for ideas in design, architecture and engineering. It is valuable because it provides context; it shows that being inspired by nature has history and nuances and avoids falling into simplifications.
- Bionics and biomimicry in product design | Byron Iram Villamil Villar + Viviana Otálvaro (and cols.)
More than a book of trends, it is a manual for translating: observing, abstracting, prototyping. It provides a method: how to move from the natural phenomenon to the design criterion without getting stuck in the superficial metaphor.
- Down Under: The Curious Fall of a Child Who Knew Nothing and Became Everything | Formafantasma + Clément Vuillier
An initiatory tale that focuses on transformation: learning is about ceasing to look down from above. Relevant because it reminds us that design is also a practice of cognitive humility: accepting that we don’t control everything, that there are invisible layers.
In this issue of DOMUS, we find wood as a cultural and technical material, beyond the cliché. It is important in this section because it helps to think about origin, transformation, construction system and language, that is: how matter connects nature and project in a tangible way.
The garden as a laboratory: design, maintenance and climate
The garden teaches what many projects forget: that the space doesn’t end when it’s inaugurated. Here, design is measured by its ability to evolve, to be maintainable, to negotiate with the climate. It is the practical school of time.
- The garden in movement | Gilles Clément
A powerful idea: designing is about accompanying living processes, not imposing a final state. Relevant because it introduces a key notion for contemporary habitat: shared authorship with that which grows, changes, and adapts.
Blom offers a spatial intelligence applicable to any typology: rhythm, structure, sequences, sensory experience. It is useful because it translates the garden into design thinking, into how to build atmospheres without forcing.
- Love Your Plot: Gardens Inspired by Nature | Harry Rich + David Rich
An invitation to work with the site: soil, orientation, border, shelter. Relevant for designers because it shows how to turn what is given into an opportunity, and how to learn from the landscape without copying it.
- The garden without irrigation. Growing a garden without watering it | Olivier Filippi
A practical treatise on designing within realistic limits. Its importance lies in the material ethics of the climate: beauty that arises from scarcity (of water) and from intelligent decisions about species, soil and maintenance.
Creative workshop: perception exercises, visual play and imagination
After the method and the practice, it’s time to train the imagination. This section brings together books that activate hand, eye and visual thinking; and that introduce a key idea: the world is not only human.
- Drawing a tree | Bruno Munari
Munari teaches drawing as one teaches thinking: observing structure, variation, rhythm. Relevant because it combats the icon (the “generic tree”) and trains attention towards the singular: each tree is a system.
- Drawing the sun | Bruno Munari
Drawing what has no outline: light, halo, atmosphere. It matters because it connects directly with interior design: how to represent and design the intangible (feeling, temperature, luminosity).
- Graphic Design Play Book. An exploration of visual thinking | Sophie Cure & Aurélien Farina
A gym of visual thinking: exercises, rules of the game, combinatorics. Relevant for creatives because it proposes ideation tools that function as a “portable laboratory” to unlock, vary and debug.
- Swamp Thing. Christmas Special | Alan Moore / Stephen R. Bissette / John Totleben
- A deliberately strange choice: nature as consciousness, mixture, border. It is relevant because it reminds us that life is also excess, decay, strangeness; and that these imaginaries expand the creative repertoire beyond the friendly green.
Urban coda: social nature
To conclude, a piece that shifts the question: if nature is a network and a relationship, how are these networks built in the city? Here, nature appears as collective behaviour: ritual, encounter, friction, celebration.
- The party, the strange and public space | Fran Quiroga + Fiestas Raras
Relevant because it understands public space as a social ecosystem: informal rules, appropriations, intensities. It’s a good coda: remember that inhabiting is not only matter and form, but also collective energy and unpredictable uses.
If this journey leaves one common lesson, it is that creativity becomes more precise when it accepts three uncomfortable words: time, maintenance, and limit. Looking to nature as a method involves designing with processes, not just images; with materials that age and repair themselves; with solutions designed to last, adapt and –when the time comes– be dismantled.
You can read a good part of this selection at Baño de Bosque by Finsa, within the programme of Madrid Design Festival 2026.
