Isn’t biophilic design just good design?

I was at the first Biophilic Design Conference, hosted by the Journal of Biophilic Design, last week, an excellent conference and a question frequently raised by both the speakers and the delegates was “isn’t biophilic design just good design?”. I would say yes in general but, as I discussed with Chris Moriarty and Ian Ellison of Audiem, for biophilic design to stand alone there must be examples of biophilic design that is poor design and cases of good design that is not biophilic design. I believe such scenarios exist.

Advocates of brutalism, an architectural style characterised by simple block forms and raw concrete, or admirers of the minimalism, functionalism and simple geometric forms offered by modernist architecture, might not consider biophilia to be essential to good design. Art nouveau gave way to art deco, replacing designs inspired by nature with those more in tune with industrialisation. The Biophilic Design Conference was even held at the Barbican Centre, a Grade II listed exemplar of brutalist architecture, although it does offer refuge, mystery, risk/peril and awe, which are four of the 15 Patterns of Biophilic Design. 

Biophilic design can be done badly, especially the token gesture. Atriums with good daylight ingress and planting make wonderful spaces but not necessarily for working in 8 to 10 hours per day. I’ve seen atriums, particularly in education institutions, where the ground floor has been planned with desks, only to receive complaints from the occupants resulting in retrofitted sunshades and acoustic panels. And I regularly see offices with wonderful facades but the blinds permanently down. Early experiments with soundscapes such as flowing water led to discombobulation, as initially there was no actual/visual water source, and maybe people felt the urge to go to the toilet more often. I recall taking my students to an office where birdsong was piped into the reception and my students simply asked “why?”, there was no rationale, no context. 

Sadly, there are still plenty of examples of workplaces that are neither good design nor biophilic design. At the conference I mentioned my son’s girlfriend’s office, a windowless basement where she spends eight hours a day with her colleagues, with no opportunity for remote working. There are the still plenty of deep plan offices with tinted glass that offer little daylight to their occupants. Many offices do not offer spaces to socialise or eat lunch. A drive for space efficiency still leads to row upon row of blocks of 8 to 12 desks lacking human scale, rather than offering a more organic and human-centric layout. We see more greenery in offices, but it was only a few years ago that I would encounter facilities managers who didn’t want to fund the maintenance of plants or preferred installing plastic ones.

If you want to learn more about the broader aspects of biophilic design, incorporating preferences and needs based on evolutionary psychology, and take a dip into my book Beyond the Workplace Zoo.