9 March, 2016
Water – from crashing waves to trickling streams, wading pools, and water fountains – enhances the experience of a place. Pattern 5: Presence of Water The Presence of Water biophilic design pattern has evolved from research on the health and wellbeing benefits associated with access to water, including reduced stress, lower heart rate and blood…
17 February, 2016
An Interview with Michael Pawlyn, Architect & Author In The Biomimetic Office Building, lighting takes its inspiration from the translucent four-eyed spookfish and a spindly-legged cousin of the starfish, the brittle star, both deep ocean dwellers. The building’s glazed glass exterior nods to a mollusk’s iridescent shell, while our own double duty spinal column is…
5 February, 2016
The idea of ‘Green’ in Asia is dominated by certification tools. There are now some 14 national variants – not unlike LEED in the US – each offering tiered ratings at the building scale, some at the urban scale. The rating is determined by an aggregated score, the result of compliance with requirements that focus…
21 January, 2016
Spending a long period of time on a task that requires intense focus and concentration can be mentally exhausting for the human brain. Within modern day working environments, we are required to remain attentive during different tasks and activities throughout the day. However, working under pressure, or for a vast period of time can increase…
15 December, 2015
What is biophilia? To me, it’s a love and respect for nature. Biophilic design then, is showing that love and respect by preserving and harnessing nature – and working with it. Humans have always lived within nature, but in the developed world buildings and cities have gradually created a barrier between us and the great…
14 December, 2015
Complexity, as one of the more abstract biophilic concepts, has gained quite a bit of traction as a welcomed design challenge. We talk about the objective of the Complexity & Order pattern (#10) as a means for creating a visually nourishing environment, based on an understanding of the symmetries, fractal geometries and spatial hierarchies that…
5 November, 2015
The accommodation we choose when traveling is an important aspect of the whole experience and should naturally be somewhere that will aide our path to decompressing the stress of our everyday lives, whilst aiding relaxation and calm. We’ve picked out three contrasting examples of hotels that daydreams are made of; that embody biophilic principles to…
19 October, 2015
When we think of biophilic design, we think of nature. Its primary intention to reintroduce nature into our built environments. Yet much of the project and literature focus of biophilic design has been on interior environments. What about applications of biophilic design to the external built environment? There is a noticeable bias towards architecture and…
30 September, 2015
How can we design the mindful office? What would a mindful office look and feel like? An introduction to mindfulness We live and work in a world full of distracting pollution. With increased digital connectivity through access to emails, social media, the web’s encyclopedic repository of information and all the other distractions that are commonplace…
25 September, 2015
In my earlier article I outlined the benefit of biophilic design in educational settings and showed you a lovely example of St Mary’s infant school designed by Jessop & Cook imbued with biophilic principles. Further research shows that optimising exposure to daylight alone can improve school attendance by an average of 3.5 days/year and test…
Catie Ryan 
Interface 
Nirmal Kishnani 
Oliver Heath 
Richard Hassel 
Joe Clancy