![blue patterned wallpaper with lots of hidden animals](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-3-1024x945.jpg)
Architectural Curator Darrin Alfred Reflects on the Natural World
As a young graduate with a bachelor’s in architectural studies from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s in landscape architecture from the University of Colorado Denver, Darrin Alfred soon discovered professional practice wasn’t for him. “I wanted something I was more passionate about,” he recalls. “So, I got a job as a curatorial associate at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,” initially working on architecture, design, and digital projects under innovative curator Aaron Betsky. It proved a perfect fit, and he’s been involved with museums ever since.
In 2007, Alfred joined the Denver Art Museum, where he now heads the architecture and design department. It boasts the museum’s largest collection—more than 18,000 objects dating from the 16th century to the present, including the encyclopedic AIGA design archives—displayed since 2020 in dazzling OMA-renovated galleries in the iconic Martin Building by Gio Ponti. But it’s Studio Libeskind’s titanium-clad Hamilton Building that will host Alfred’s upcoming summer blockbuster, “Biophilia: Nature Reimagined,” a multisensory exhibition comprising more than 70 works, including architectural models and photographs, objects, furniture, fashion, digital installations, and immersive art environments that collectively address the transformative power of nature.
“The show isn’t about biophilic design, per se,” Alfred is quick to explain. “It’s more about our enduring emotional, psychological, and spiritual connections to the natural world.” Featuring an international roster of designers, architects, and artists—Iris van Herpen, Studio Gang, Zaha Hadid, Joris Laarman, Avram Rusu and DRIFT, to name a few—“Biophilia” will be organized around three themes reflecting aspects of nature that most influence our well-being: Natural Analogs: Form and Pattern; Natural Systems: Processes and Phenomena; and Topophilia: People and Place. We spoke to Alfred about the show.
![Headshot of Darrin Alfred](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-10-683x1024.jpg)
![Headshot of Darrin Alfred](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-10-683x1024.jpg)
Reflect On Nature With Darrin Alfred
![dark lit room with multiple colored lanterns hanging from the ceiling](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-6-1024x631.jpg)
![dark lit room with multiple colored lanterns hanging from the ceiling](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-6-1024x631.jpg)
Interior Design: What was the genesis of “Biophilia?”
Darrin Alfred: With my landscape background, and having lived for 16 years in Colorado, I was interested in the deep connection people here feel for the outdoors. I see it in California, too, but I don’t think we necessarily understand where this passion comes from or why we have an enduring bond with the natural world. I began noticing work that addressed the environment—the greening of design—but also did more than that by exploring how nature affects our physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development, individually and collectively. Around 2016, I pitched the idea of a show underscoring the transformative role in contemporary designers, architects, and artists can play in rekindling this bond. It got pushed aside by other projects, the new galleries, and then COVID, but everything started to solidify about two years ago, and here we are.
ID: How would you characterize these types of work in general?
DA: Works that call us to heighten our senses, to observe the natural world more closely. They offer moments of quiet catharsis that allow us to slow down amidst the hyper-accelerated digital lives we all live today. In looking for works that really do that, we developed three themes or lenses to help bring them into focus.
![white building with different cutouts in the middle of a busy street](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-4-1024x791.jpg)
![white building with different cutouts in the middle of a busy street](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-4-1024x791.jpg)
ID: What’s the first theme and what pieces in the show represent it?
DA: Natural Analogs, which relates to the shapes, structures, and geometries found in nature—the spirals, honeycombs, and dendritic patterns that our brains have developed an affinity for. A good example is the Floraform Chandelier by the Palenville, New York, studio Nervous System, which translates the cellular growth patterns of leaves and petals using complex algorithms and 3-D printing to fabricate a nylon hanging light that casts intricate shadows.
ID: What’s the second category?
DA: Natural Systems, which explores nature’s dynamic processes—seasonal and temporal changes such as weather patterns and botanical growth cycles. These works are more immersive and multi-sensory, like Meadow by Amsterdam studio DRIFT; it’s a kinetic sculpture of oversize mechanical silk flowers that mimics the nyctinastic opening and closing of blossoms in a choreographed sequence. Or the international art collective teamLab’s Flowers and People, an interactive digital installation with a meditative soundtrack that presents a year’s worth of computer-generated seasonal flowers blooming and withering over the course of an hour.
![digital screen filled with red and yellow flowers](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-5-1024x459.jpg)
![digital screen filled with red and yellow flowers](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-5-1024x459.jpg)
ID: You’ve dubbed the final theme Topophilia. What’s that?
DA: It delves into the emotional and spiritual connection that humanity has with the physical environment through works that highlight the interplay between people and nature, culture and place. Desert Paper—a collaboration between Aranda\Lasch, which works out of New York and Tucson, Arizona, and Terrol Dew Johnson, an artist, basket weaver, and member of the Tohono O’odham Nation in Southwestern Arizona—is a series of experimental vessels incorporating natural materials Johnson gathered in the Sonoran Desert. Here in downtown Denver, the Populus hotel by Studio Gang takes its name from the Latin for quaking aspen, an instantly recognizable symbol of Colorado. The 13-story scalloped facade evokes a stand of the trees while the distinctive window shapes resemble bark patterns on their trunks. It’s under construction but should open around the same time as the exhibition.
![different handcrafted glass vessels inspired by mushrooms against green backdrop](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-12-1024x1024.jpg)
![different handcrafted glass vessels inspired by mushrooms against green backdrop](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-12-1024x1024.jpg)
![blue patterned wallpaper with lots of hidden animals](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-3-1024x945.jpg)
![blue patterned wallpaper with lots of hidden animals](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-3-1024x945.jpg)
![blue patterned wallpaper with lots of hidden animals](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-3-1024x945.jpg)
![reddish sculpture resembling a tree on a rock](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-8-1024x819.jpg)
![reddish sculpture resembling a tree on a rock](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-8-1024x819.jpg)
![black plate patterned with pinecone-like spirals](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-9-1024x1024.jpg)
![black plate patterned with pinecone-like spirals](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-9-1024x1024.jpg)
![person standing before a screen of long green algae](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-698x1024.jpg)
![person standing before a screen of long green algae](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-698x1024.jpg)
![hanging chandelier glowing white in a pitch black room](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-11-729x1024.jpg)
![hanging chandelier glowing white in a pitch black room](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-11-729x1024.jpg)
![model walking down runway with a gossamer web-like gown](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-13-681x1024.jpg)
![model walking down runway with a gossamer web-like gown](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-13-681x1024.jpg)
![brown basket-like sculpture](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-14-1024x935.jpg)
![brown basket-like sculpture](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-14-1024x935.jpg)
![chair-like sculpture made of plant-like printed material](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-2-768x1024.jpg)
![chair-like sculpture made of plant-like printed material](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-2-768x1024.jpg)
![bronze plant sculpture that seems to be floating](https://interiordesign.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/InteriorDesign_Feb2024_CreativeVoices-7-768x1024.jpg)
![bronze plant sculpture that seems to be floating](jpg/interiordesign_feb2024_creativevoices-7-768x1024.jpg)
read more
Projects
The Denver Art Museum Gets a Thoughtful Update
A comprehensive four-year overhaul of the multibuilding campus of the Denver Art Museum included both renovation and expansion.
Projects
A Must-See Installation at the National Building Museum
See the 2023 Interior Design Best of Year Awards winner for Installation, “Look Here” by Reddymade on display at the National Building Museum.
DesignWire
This Meditative Art Installation is Meant to Aid Healing
Hanging in the 80-foot-high atrium of a Swiss hospital is Loops, an installation by SpY and Studio Banana named after its two dozen large, kinetic circles.
read designwire
DesignWire
Behind the Mic: Get to Know Jeremiah Brent
What does Jeremiah Brent, interior designer and host of the Ideas of Order podcast, have to say about home? It turns out, quite a lot.
DesignWire
Design Icon and Hall of Famer Gaetano Pesce Dies at 84
Gaetano Pesce, a visionary designer, artist and sculptor who enchanted the world with his unique sense of materiality, has passed at 84.
DesignWire
10 Questions With…Abeer Seikaly
Explore how Amman-based designer and architect Abeer Seikaly bridges the gap between traditional design and contemporary aesthetics.