Architect Joel Sanders seeks building designs that integrate with nature

Five years ago, New York-based architect Joel Sanders was renovating a Manhattan penthouse when he ran into a problem.

"There was a rooftop garden, and what we needed to figure out was how to connect it to the loft," he says. "We decided to reverse modernist convention. Instead of taking hard materials outside, we brought the outside in."

Like a waterfall of greenery, the roof garden makes its way into the centre of the apartment through a skylit atrium, through which runs a minimalist wood and metal staircase. The green space serves a dual function as a focal point and a barrier, separating the public areas of the apartment from the bedroom. Glass walls in the bathroom look out to lush foliage; bathing inside "is like being in a spa", Sanders says. "We made living with nature part of the lifestyle of the apartment by literally weaving the indoor and outdoor spaces together."

It's a concept that scales up. Last year, Sanders and landscape architect Diana Balmori, both of whom teach at the Yale School of Architecture, published Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture, which seeks to eliminate the "false dichotomy between architecture and landscape" - the idea that the built environment is distinct from the natural one. In a public lecture tomorrow, Sanders brings his message to Chinese University's School of Architecture.

"What we need to do now, because of the imperative to face environmental issues today, is to see buildings and landscapes as always being interrelated," says Sanders. "We need to design buildings that are green, sustainable and tied into the environment, but also spatially integrate the indoors and outdoors."

Sanders argues that the divide between buildings and nature is deeply rooted in Western culture.

"Mother Nature became something that had to be protected from the ravages of modern civilisation," Sanders says. That philosophy informed landscape architects like Frederick Law Olmsted, whose meticulously designed green spaces - including New York's Central Park - disguised their traces of human intervention. "There was a kind of guilty conscience that said to design the landscape was to somehow violate it," Sanders says. "Even today, a green building is still seen as a building that somehow leaves nature untouched."