February 5, 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…
December 15, 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…
November 5, 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…
October 19, 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…
September 30, 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…
September 25, 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…
July 24, 2015
There is so much evidence about the advantages of biophilic design elements being incorporated into office design. So, we thought we’d share some inspiring examples of office interiors that are putting theory into practice; creating spaces that are teeming with vitality where workers can feel inspired and thrive. Ljubljana Chamber of Commerce and Industry The…
June 10, 2015
According to the UN by 2050 nearly 70% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas, there will be more cities and more mega-cities. As our contact with rural landscapes decreases our alienation from greenery and living elements will increase unless we green the urban environment and the spaces in which we live.…
June 1, 2015
The challenge of biophilic design is to address prevailing deficiencies of contemporary building, landscape and interior architecture by initiating a new framework for the beneficial experience of nature in the built environment (Kellert et al 2008, Kellert 2012, Kellert and Finnegan 2011). Biophilic design is about creating good habitat for people as a biological organism…
May 22, 2015
Educational buildings can vary vastly in scale and capacity; from small village nurseries, through to schools that cater for hundreds of students and universities where the campuses can be like self-contained cities. What they have in common, however, is that each of them contains a combination of students who are there to learn, staff that…
Nirmal Kishnani 
Richard Hassel 
Oliver Heath 
Joe Clancy 
Dr. Stephen Kellert