Biophilia

What’s that old house? I like that. Like mosaic out bricks over there. That’s fun. My bicycles are roller bla in the building. Uh oh. Whoa. That is awesome. That’s crazy. How do those grow in here? My name is Louisa Whitmore. I’m passionate about good design, particularly good architectural design because of the way it’s all skylights up there and all that construction. It’s like actual trees growing inside. I would’ve thought for that they would’ve had to have like an open roof. That’s really cool. It would be amazing to study in this space, I think.

On social media, I talk a lot about urban design. I’ve built up a social media following based on my likes. Why yellow? But I do really love the idea behind them and sometimes dislikes of buildings. This building, 432 Park Avenue in New York City, is the worst building in the world based on absolutely nothing. Architecture has always fascinated me, and I guess it fascinates many other people too. I’ve started to see a pattern in what I like and don’t like, and it usually has to do with whether nature is integrated into the design. That concept is referred to as biophilic design. It’s the integration of natural elements into the built space.

I want to learn more, so I’m gonna talk to some experts who will explain biophilic concepts and share how nature-based designs can impact every aspect of our lives. We’ve been encroaching on nature for far too long. Maybe it’s time we let nature encroach on us.

What do you think biophilia is? I found myself having to Google it when I first heard it. I thought it was a disease. That’s actually a very good question. People tend to have different answers to this question. Biophilia, by definition, is the love of life—using the patterns and processes in nature and applying them to design, particularly architecture. So designing buildings so that we have a tree in the atrium or a green roof, and those are great. Those are really interesting ways of bringing greenness into cities. At the same time, I think we limit ourselves if we think just about buildings. So whether it be forms, it be sounds, it be smells, it’d be sense and touch. It’s bringing those elements of the natural world into the built environment.

The human brain loves the pattern of sunlight filtering through tree branches and leaves, which can be a very abstract thing to create with lighting patterns, but if you do it, it’s powerful. We’re genetically driven towards spaces that resemble nature-like elements.

I headed to a rooftop garden at the University of British Columbia to learn more about the role nature can play in good design. Hi. Hey Louisa, welcome to UBC. So glad to be here. We’re here in the Center for Interactive Research on Sustainability. Should we go check it out? Yeah, absolutely. This building is all about biophilic design and sustainability, and the building gets us to interact with nature. This is the rooftop garden. So we have this kind of messy rooftop garden here that also provides pollinator habitat and cools the building. We have sort of greenness along one side of the building that helps to provide shade.

There’s a concept called the 3-30-300 rule, and I think it’s a really interesting way to look at biophilia or biophilic design in our neighborhoods. All of us should have access or views of three trees outside of our windows of our house, 30% canopy cover in our neighborhood, and a park or other green space within 300 meters of our house. That would allow us to experience biophilia on a daily basis.

I got some seeds on me, little burrs. I am trying to act as a seed spreader back into the messy garden. I realized I was just throwing them into the pavement, so I’m not doing that anymore. Okay, I think that’s the best I’m gonna get it.

Lauren explained the importance of nature’s presence in our daily lives. I wanted to see some facts and data that supported her point, so I met with Emily Grant and Robin Zu. They studied the human response to nature and showed me some of the science behind it all.

This is the watch that’s going to measure your skin conductance and heart rate and body temperature. So as you can see, we’ve got your heart rate there, so you’re not dead. Always a good thing. Good to know. We can just start with the study now. Emily uses virtual reality to study our response to nature. I would be the perfect candidate for this biophilia documentary. She started by getting me really stressed out by putting me in a fake job interview.

Perfect for this job because I’m already doing it. You still have more time. We can stop that and we’ll probably get all that data on that watch. Once I was suitably stressed, I was immersed in a bustling intersection in one of my favorite cities, New York. Solid. Next, I was dropped into a natural space in Croatia, a place I’ve never been. Emily recorded my physiological responses. I’m just gonna stop there for now. Thank you so much for being a part of that. Sorry, we had to put you in a really intense urban environment, but then we can compare to potentially more restorative environments because we’ve seen that nature can be a little bit less stressful than New York Times Square. Would you like to see your physiological results? I would.

This is your blood by volume pulse, and that’s what’s measuring your heart rate as well as your intra-beat intervals. What we can see is this is the stress induction, which clearly had an effect. Very strong, very fascinating. With body temperature, nice and high. But then what we also see is when we put you into the natural space, huge relaxation in your heart rate. So we actually, you have constant stress and then complete dead relaxed in no time at all. I didn’t really feel like I was relaxing that much more. That’s insane. People constantly underestimate how restorative nature will be. They think, oh, it’s just out there. It’s great, sure, but I’m fine in urban environments. But actually, you can be significantly better in a natural space. Wow. That’s really cool.

Not only is nature good for our health, it’s also good for the health of our cities. Green roofs are a common example of biophilic design, and Vancouver House is one of the most visible in my hometown. Welcome to the Vancouver House Green Roof. Green roofs play a big role in sustainability in urban cities. This roof provides a biodiverse environment for a whole variety of pollinators. You can see here, just by looking around, there are literally hundreds of bees up here. Essentially, this is a mountain meadow in the middle of downtown Vancouver. A green roof is like a sponge. It absorbs the rainwater when it falls and it keeps it from making its way to the storm sewer, which gives the storm sewer a little bit of a break. If you look around, all you’ll see is steel and glass and concrete. That lends itself to an overheated environment. What this roof does is it cools the local air down and improves the air quality. That’s why this green roof plays such an important role in a big city like Vancouver.

Green roofs serve many purposes. Vertical trellises bring nature to small spaces. Rooftop farms provide food for urban communities. It’s so cool that somebody took the time to plant sunflowers on top of a building, and industrial living roofs recycle and clean water. When we reintroduce nature into our buildings, it can bring about amazing changes in our cities. There’s clinical evidence that supports that gardens and landscapes contribute to health and well-being. One of the world’s most iconic examples of this is the Van Deusen Botanical Garden Visitor Center. You can see the curvy shape. That building was designed after an orchid leaf. The connection of a flower, which is a living, breathing thing, and it needs water, light, and sunlight to grow—we felt like this is a living building. In 2014, it won the world’s most sustainable building award. That was a highlight for us because the world’s a big place, and there’s lots of projects. This garden acts almost like green lungs for the neighborhoods of Vancouver. It’s a building that collects water. It collects its own heat and energy to power the building. Philosophically, to me, it still checks all the boxes of a biophilic project.

Biophilic design doesn’t just improve the city. It can also improve the lives of the people who live there. In Vancouver and many cities across the world, I feel that modern planning ideologies have allowed cars to really invade every available space. A lot of the work that I do is actually taking those spaces back, converting them into plazas, and slowly teasing them into what we hope to be. Robson Square—originally the entirety of this strip we see over here was a street; cars ran through it, it was all traffic. Closing it off allowed two spaces to be linked together. On one side, you can see the art gallery with steps coming down and some art features. There’s a portion of UBC’s campus is also here. On the other side, you have water features and meandering greenery and cascading steps that allow both cyclists and pedestrians to step down. It’s kind of about a little bit of everything. It’s a very pleasant transitional space for people to pass through but also linger, thereby increasing better mental health, better physical health. People bike through here. It’s no longer a space you’re just borrowing from vehicles. It’s become all these glorious things that humans have always gravitated towards since the beginning of time.

This is one of my favorite spaces. That got me to thinking—if natural design improves our buildings, our moods, and our cities, what else can it affect? Different kinds of space, of different kinds of functionalities, and biophilia may be more or less appropriate for the kinds of function that you’re really looking for. When I look at this space, I see a number of different things that resemble biophilic components. For example, one of the things that you notice immediately about this environment is that it’s very open, so you can really have beautiful lines of sight. Researchers tend to call that permeability, so you’re able to see far out. At the same time, there are lots of opportunities here in case you want to seek privacy, to go to a corner where you’re not completely exposed. This idea is consistent with this old idea in the field called prospect and refuge. That being that people tend to like spaces that allow them to see out but also have opportunities for them to seek refuge and comfort if they feel like doing that. A learning environment is a biophilic environment. Everybody’s engaged with each other. There’s a sense of feeling and needing to collaborate and be together—that already is in a way biophilic. How do you create a sense of relief through biophilic design? Comfortable furniture is another really important feature that interacts with everything else.

There’s been loads and loads of research on the psychology of color. By and large, people tend to prefer colors that fall in the blue-green palette. The reason why we like green and blue palettes is because they resemble the color of the sky and the greenery that we like. The reason why we don’t like browns and yellows is because they tend to be associated with the decay of biological matter. There are ways to bring biophilic design into the office building that not only increase productivity but also increase happiness because there’s an innate connection to the natural world. This is a place that we cut this hole out to allow this big stair to come. We have large group meetings here. We know from research that when we put people in a great indoor environment with daylight, lots of clean air to breathe, and a great design environment, people will be more engaged. They will be able to focus better, they will produce more and be more productive, and ultimately this leads to a better appreciation for the workplace. I think we, as individuals, are part of nature. Even when we’re sitting on this stair, I know every time our studio comes together, it’s a wonderful feeling.

Another feature that’s been studied a lot is the impact of ceiling height on how people feel and think. This research has shown that if you happen to be in a room with high ceilings, this tends to promote abstraction, which is really good for creativity. If you happen to be doing the exact same task in a room with low ceilings, your thinking becomes a lot more concrete. That’d be consistent with a biophilic feature. And what about our health? Can good design keep us healthy? Can it change the way we heal when we’re sick? This connection between biophilic design, health, and well-being, and great buildings has been well understood in the healthcare sector for a long time. Reliably, the patients who have access to the outdoors and have views of nature are recovering more quickly, purely due to a better, more stimulating environment. Any garden can be a healing garden. However, when they’re designed specifically with intent for a particular population of people who may have cancer or may have Alzheimer’s or some other disease, suddenly those places are very supportive to the particular kinds of illness that they may have. These things that engage us deeply are found in nature. Yet when we use them in design, it’s a wow.

It seems like biophilic design influences just about every part of our lives—our homes, our schools, our work, our health, and our well-being. Is it just better? Should nature be the model for everything? This is a really pretty river in my mind. The only model we have of the sustainable system is nature. I think it’s really important to know that biomimicry is not a new idea. There’s an indigenous elder I work with who’s become a very close friend of mine. When I told her what I did, she said, well, Jamie, we’ve been doing biomimicry for thousands of years. And that’s why I think nature is the greatest teacher, not just in design but in business, in politics, and economics. When we leverage those ideas from nature, we might create more in harmony with nature and more sustainably.

If nature truly is the basis for all good design, then it seems only fair that everyone has access to it. Biophilic design needs to be democratized because if the only people who are benefiting from it are wealthy, that’s extremely problematic. When you think about where marginalized people live in a city, they’re often in these high-rise jungles. A lot of those buildings are older, so they didn’t necessarily have to fulfill a green roof by law. There’s a concept, and it’s called distributional equity, and that’s addressing inequities through the distribution of the resource that typically isn’t available. The city is in the process of developing an equity framework of how to assess spaces and rank them on which ones are the most viable for upgrade. It’s related to biophilic design because it challenges the dominant theories of restoration that are offered in the sense that we have to account for these other things. You can’t just build a park and that’s going to solve all of society’s problems. I think it is about creating a demand, which really comes with creating awareness around biophilic design. But eventually, you do need to make it accessible to everybody. That is a movement in itself. But what I’m trying to do here is a big piece of it—that engagement, that inclusivity, bringing people in, letting them feel welcome.

In downtown Toronto, I met a team of urban farmers who are using biophilic design to bring about major change in their community. My main goal is to increase representation in spaces like this for people of African descent. Maybe next year, having a big log here in the middle so that you can just come and be in the middle with all the plants and sit down and look at them. That’s awesome. That would be wonderful. We’re right here, smack dab in the middle of downtown Toronto. You can hear the traffic around us, sometimes you’ll hear the sirens going off, but we’re still growing beautiful food. The urban farm up on this roof can produce up to 10,000 pounds of food a year. Black food sovereignty is really about growing food that’s culturally significant to us. I always will welcome the teachings and learnings of my indigenous colleagues and friends because they’ve been living on this land in a sustainable way for millennia. From here on out is where the indigenous foodways officially begin. Specifically, this rooftop is special because it’s the first of its kind. It’s the first indigenous-led program, and what makes it special is we use traditional growing methods and indigenous agricultural practices.

A lot of indigenous people come from communities all over Canada and they come to the city to seek resources that their smaller communities don’t have. The design is based off of the medicine wheel, which is a sacred, iconic symbol to indigenous people. One of the things that impacts them is when they leave their communities, they don’t have access to their cultural medicines. It’s very hard to find those medicines growing in the city, and these are one of the places that they could actually come to and see them growing. This rooftop provides more spaces that are geared towards indigenous communities because there aren’t enough spaces dedicated to them. So we kind of create a community for them.

Biophilic design can help us learn, work, heal, grow. It touches every part of our lives. But the big question is, can good design change the world? I think good design will change the world. I think it is changing the world. I wake up every day inspired because my job is about that design world, about how to create design that’s inspired by nature. It’s thinking about the future. What’s the future that you want, and how are we gonna build it together? If we start to see our lives as part of the greater ecosystem, it’s just gonna allow for greater sustainability. I think that’s how mentalities are going to shift if we keep up with this biophilic movement. If that mentality is all of us now, think of how much could change. It improves our mental health, it improves our creativity, and increases our ability to learn. These are the places that help us become better people. That’s what’s so exciting—we just have to learn how to listen to nature again. We’ve kind of tuned her out. So by integrating back into nature, learning how to listen again, learning how to listen from a new lens, she’ll teach you everything you need to know for how to thrive on this planet. You just have to listen and find out how it applies to your path.

Here’s the thing: good design, biophilic design, really can change the world. It can brighten a room, improve our health, maybe even save the planet. It can make us more productive, more creative, more at peace. It can make us all better people, but we have a long way to go to achieve that ideal. So let’s keep the conversation going.