were described in nurses’ notes as having better attitudes. Published
in Science in 1984, the study made a splash and has been cited by
thousands of researchers. If you’ve ever noticed a nature photograph
on the ceiling or walls of your dentist’s exam room, you have Ulrich
to thank.
SINCE THEN, WINDOW STUDIES have examined everything from schools
to office buildings to housing projects. They have shown that nature
views support increased worker productivity, less job stress, higher
academic grades and test scores and less aggression in inner-city
residents. The studies measure something different and far less
ambitious than a full sensory immersion in a hinoki forest. They look
at “accidental nature,” the exposure you get without trying. It’s the
mere blot of green glimpsed on the way to the laundry or between
sentence diagrams. Some of the studies are small and seem vulnerable
to confounding factors. Perhaps people who are wealthier, healthier
and happier to begin with prefer to be closer to nature? The best
studies, though, are large and designed to weed out competing factors.
Frances Kuo, yet another academic spawn of the Kaplans at
Michigan, is a psychologist who now runs the Landscape and Human
Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
She was interested in constructing experiments to test the logical
playing-out of Kaplans’ Attention Restoration Theory. If our brains
get fatigued by too much direct attention, and if that makes us
irritable, then wouldn’t we also be more likely to become violent?
Could spending time looking at nature make us less violent, and if so,
would a simple view out a window be enough to make a difference?
Among her seminal studies were some from the early 2000s looking
at views, violence and cognition at the brutalist Robert Taylor
housing project (now razed) in Chicago. Some of the buildings faced
barren asphalt streetscapes and some faced modest lawns dotted with