For this blog, we will approach biophilic design from the perspective of building a new home so that we can highlight the different elements that you can incorporate into your home. However, many elements could also added or incorporated into an existing home. The benefit of thinking about biophilic design as a series of principles and guideline is that any improvements you make can benefit you and there are no hard rules to force you into decisions you don’t want to make—remember biophilic design is an approach to make you happier and healthier in your home.

While approaching biophilic design might seem daunting, breaking it down into the different elements can make it much simpler. We will use one house as an example, to help you understand how to do that with your own project.

Location

If you haven’t chosen your lot yet, think about how it might help your well-being and sense of calm. We are naturally attracted to open vistas and waterfront locations for a reason.  Being able to see nature and experience it while being protected is a key aspect to biophilic design.

This home is located on the oceanside of a Caribbean island.  It does a fantastic job of bringing the outdoors in with its panoramic views. The windows provide natural light and the occupants of the home can perceive the passing of time from sunrise to sunset.

The expansive views also signal opportunities for fun and adventure, like going swimming or scuba diving while providing comfort and protection from the weather by being able to see approaching storms or bad weather before they come too close.

Exterior Approach

As you think about how your home sits in its environment, look about how to create your home as an extension of nature. Things like creating an organic approach to your home like a winding pathway or natural landscaping including a mix of plants, rocks or geological features creates a sense of well-being and can create a transitional zone from nature to your home.

Also note how the round home shape evokes nature from the outside. The house here sits organically in the landscape. The unique shape complements the natural structures to create an organic environment rather than the often bulky and unnatural straight lines of many homes. An additional benefit to this shape is its resistance to hurricanes. While this is not traditionally considered a biophilic design principle, we think protection from the extreme wrath of nature is a definite benefit that could be included!

As you come to the entrance, note how this home creates a transitional space outside the home to prepare you to enter the home. Something as simple as outlining the entrance with some outside fence details and an extended landing creates this unique space.

Exterior

The exterior of this home includes a covered deck with lounge chairs and outdoor dining table. Beyond creating additional living area, it also plays a useful role in biophilic design.  The porch itself signifies a transition from the inside to the outside, providing a cushioning space for you to move between the two areas. Just like the natural richness of an estuary, this space is a very valuable living area. The chairs and table allow you to relax directly interacting and engaging with nature while the structure of the home not only shields your body from the harmful effects of the sun but signals your brain that you are in the protected home environment.

Interior—Overall

Bringing nature into your home can be done in a multitude of ways. We have previously talked about the importance of windows to look out into nature. Colors, materials, textures and patterns are critical ways to help biophilic design create a natural sanctuary for you in your home.  Further decorating with plants, furniture and fixtures are great ways to add additional biophilic benefits—and one of the easiest ways if you have an existing home. Just remember that a core principle of biophilic design is to create not just direct and indirect experiences, but spatial ones. So, you should look at how each element creates a larger feeling or environment that mimics natural ones. While a single houseplant is nice, a grouping of natural houseplants creating a natural space within your home is what actually creates a biophilic benefit.

Interior—Colors, materials, textures and patterns

Mimicking nature inside includes using natural colors in your home that bring the palette outside your home into your home. The goal is to transition from the outside to the inside through the use of color, while you get the benefit of protection being in the home. In the mountains that might mean greens and yellows.

This home is dominated by the natural colors found in its oceanside location. The off-white color of the walls is symbolic of the sand, clouds and cresting waves found outside. The kitchen wall uses a pattern that evokes the sense of waves.

Or in the bathrooms, the use of tile or screens creates islands of patterns to add natural texture to the environment that evokes different aspects of the outside world.

Many homes use natural materials such as granite or hardwood floors to provide a direct connection to nature. Using natural materials throughout the home creates a biophilic benefit. However, you can use man-made materials that also evoke nature for an indirect benefit. Engineered floors can use natural wood patterns, or your quartz countertops might have natural looking color variations in it.

In this home, the grey floors you see in the images above mimics not just the colors of outside stones, but the natural wood grain patterns add a textural indirect benefit.

Interior—Plants, furniture and fixtures

As mentioned, using plants, furniture and fixtures are a valuable way to incorporate biophilic design into your home while being one of the easiest ways to do it in an existing home.

The goal here is to create an over-all feeling for your home that mimics your surrounding natural environment. Putting a money tree in your foyer might be bring you wealth and good fortune, but it will not win you a gold star for biophilic design.

While the furniture and fixtures in this home come from all over the world, all of them are designed to create a more natural environment for the home.  The lounges utilize natural materials that evoke nature.

While most of the furniture matches the soft, natural color pallete in the surrounding area, the rugs and pillows are used to create vivid splashes of color to replicate the vibrancy of flowers or colorful birds.

In the photo below, notice the large wooden piece behind the dining room table that not only adds natural material to the home, but also utilizes complex patterns.

Light fixtures are an extremely useful way to build in biophilic features into your home. This home uses Moroccan lights to create playful patterns in the evening. However, this home really goes all in to use lighting to introduce an indirect effect of biophilic design. With the flick of a light switch, you can project blue patterned lights onto the ceiling to replicate the blue waves of the Caribbean Sea outside.

Spatially

All these direct and indirect references to nature create a very special environment that brings out the best benefits of not just island living but also of creating a natural sanctuary that brings the calming benefits of nature in while protecting against her harshest elements.  The owners were driven by their desire to create a home that co-existed with nature, but guided by a quote from Axel Munthe:

“My home shall be open for the sun and the wind and the voices of the sea – like a Greek temple – and light, light, light everywhere!”

The post Biophilic Design Part 3: Design in Your Home appeared first on Deltec Homes.

The simple answer is: a lot. Biophilic design is rapidly gaining popularity as people become even more interested in creating healthier public spaces, commercial buildings, and homes that promote heathier living. The recent pandemic is only accelerating that trend.

But, how do you apply biophilic design? There are some overarching principles and attributes that guide how to approach biophilic design that apply across all different structures and spaces. Here we will look at those guiding principles and how to apply them to the build environment.

Design Parameters

You can approach biophilic design from many different angles and there is a wide assortment of approaches.  One of the better and most defined approaches, comes from the Practice of Biophilic Design, which we have used to focus this blog.

Broadly speaking, you can define biophilic design within 5 key principles.

1. Fosters a repeated and sustained engagement with nature
2. Focuses on human adaptations to the natural world that have advanced people’s health, fitness and wellbeing.
3. Encourages an emotional attachment to a setting and/or place. 
4. Promotes positive interactions between people and nature that encourage responsibility and stewardship for the human and natural communities.
5. Drives towards ecologically connected, mutually reinforced and integrated solutions. 

Within the principles, there are different ways or levels of how you experience biophilic design:

1. Directly
2. Indirectly
3. Spatially (place and space)

To simply demonstrate the difference, let’s look at an example of the different ways a flower might be incorporated into biophilic design:

1. Direct—having a flowering houseplant in your home
2. Indirect—Having a painting or sculpture of a flowering plant in your home
3. Spatially—Having a light-filled sunroom that mimics the feeling of a flowering garden

Direct Experience of Nature: 

This is the most obvious of the levels. It includes using the built environment to directly provide contact with the natural world. Below are some of the main elements that impact biophilic design and its importance:

• Light—Our bodies have a circadian rhythm that follows a daily and seasonal cycle. Providing access to natural light helps distinguish between day and night as well as different seasons.
• Air—Providing natural or simulated ventilation access to fresh air is comforting to humans
• Water—provides a multi-sensory benefit. It can be visually or aurally calming or both. It can vary from water elements like a fountain to an environmental location like waterfront or oceanside.
• Plants—Beyond some direct health benefits with having plants in your home, they also are one of the simplest yet most effective ways to bring nature into your home. One caveat is to focus on native vegetation rather than exotic ones for a variety of reasons.
• Animals—while pets are fantastic for many reasons, this refers to wild animals (with the possible exception of fish in an aquarium). While you cannot directly influence this, you can make your landscape more attractive to wildlife from birds to deer to even bears or reindeer. Things like birdfeeders or deer friendly planting to even technology driven solutions like webcams are helpful. (Just make sure that you provide a safe environment for them and you—including your family member pets)
• Weather—Being able to sense the weather is important. From being able to step outside onto a deck to see what the weather is doing, to simulating ideal weather conditions like air flow, temperature and humidity, weather plays a critical role in our well-being.
• Ecosystems—natural landscaping helps promote well-being. Including a mix or plants, rocks, geological forms that mimic a natural environment have proven to be better than more formal and constructed landscapes (nothing against a formal English garden, though, which can be quite beautiful)
• Fire—while natural fire can be very dangerous, contained fire has been been a great man-made triumph that has provided safety and nourishment to us. Providing a refence to fire, including a fireplace or even simulated fire can be beneficial (make sure it is a direct vent or other safe and efficient fireplace for sustainability reasons)

Indirect experience of nature:

This includes any kind of representation of nature rather than nature itself. As such, you can often use design within any built environment to create an indirect experience to nature.

• Natural images—provide both emotional and intellectual benefits. The best benefit comes from the more complex, repeated textures and shapes of nature rather than isolated instances. Using different art mediums to achieve this a great way to accomplish it.
• Natural materials—provide both visual and tactile benefits. This includes stone, wood, cotton and leather among others. There is a connection to organic matter than man-made materials find tough to replicate.
• Natural colors—help promote calm and wellbeing and were historically used to help locate food, water and other resources. Since humans are primarily diurnal (active during the day), earth-tones or more muted colors are generally preferable, while bright pops of color can be used to evoke fields of wildflowers, sunsets or exotic locations.
• Simulated natural light and air—re-creating the ideal external environment inside is important. That can include using full spectrum lights and humidifiers/dehumidifiers to create a more comfortable living environment.
• Naturalistic shapes and forms—This evokes a more organic experience that replicates a living environment. This can be found in patterns, the repetition of patterns, or items. (it can be as simple as a leaf pattern to the polygonal patterns from the Islamic Golden Era.) Importantly, it is critical that it creates the feeling of a natural space vs. random elements.
• Evoking nature—this is related to natural shapes and forms but rather than directly using them, it means referencing or evoking their shapes. The Sydney Opera House is one of the most famous examples of this.
• Biomimicry—this is an interesting field of study that uses natural forms and functions to provide solutions to our needs.

Spatially (space and place)

This includes our emotions dictated by the environment in which we find ourselves. It defines itself based on the overall space and place of our surroundings ourselves rather than specific elements that create it. It is the sum total of the equation.

• Prospect and refuge—this is a yin/yang concept. The ability to feel both the opportunity of the natural setting while being protected from it. The feeling of being hugged by the calming and comforting elements of mother nature while being protected from her most extreme and destructive tendencies that lash out at you.
• Organized Complexity-One of the miracles of nature is to be incredibly complex yet appear amazingly simple. Complexity can be jarring and promote feelings of confusion and anxiety if random and strewn about, but if organized or placed in natural patterns, then that same complexity can be stimulating and enriching instead.

• Integration of parts to the whole—the linking of spaces within the built environment while maintaining clearly defined edges and boundaries
• Transitional spaces—These are helpful to integrating parts to the whole. They provide the ability to move between spaces gently and naturally. Think of an estuary that sits between a river and an ocean.  Beyond providing a transition, it creates its own environment that is one of the richest natural environments.  In a home, it could be a screened in porch that is neither inside nor outside but its own space that links both.
• Mobility and wayfinding—Humans want to be able to clearly find their way along defined paths with an obvious entrance and exit. There is a primal need to know how to escape a confined space. Knowing how to move through a space relieves anxiety and confusion. Think about trying to move through a sprawling airport trying to catch a flight vs. finding your room in a typical hotel.
• Cultural and ecological attachment to place—Looking back through our evolution as territorial creatures, we hold a strong attraction to familiar places. It provides a sense of safety and comfort. The familiarity reassures us that things are okay. Culturally relevant designs help us understand our personal human relevance in the environment. Ecological connections help us similarly by establishing a level of comfort provided by recognizable geographies and native fauna and flora. This need helps explain our desire for conservation and the satisfaction it brings.

These guiding principles and elements are found both in large scale and personal built environments. Additional blogs following in this series  will delve into both aspects.

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The current world is littered with examples of humans building structures and spaces that meet functional needs or demonstrate its power over nature. From windswept grand plazas to sunless city street corridors leading to soulless grey cubicles lined up in matrixed rows or windowless hospital rooms taken over by the arresting buzz of machines.

In the past few decades, only sparse attention has been paid to bringing nature into our living environments, often through a few sickly house plants stuck in corners or wallpaper left over from decades past.

However, it wasn’t always this way, nor should it be. The more mechanical the world becomes, the more we need to consciously consider and design for a human experience in the world.

Humans desire an innate connection with nature.  From the crackling of a campfire, to the soothing crashing of waves, to dappled sunlight through tree leaves and the organic feel of wood, we still yearn for connection with nature for security and health. Recent studies have demonstrated that.  While the term biophilic design is relatively new, the concept has been around for centuries.

A new trend with an old approach:

The practice of biophilic design predates the modern world. It was how humans were forced to live together with and dependent on nature.

With the rise of agriculture 12,000 years ago and then the evolution to the concept of the urban environment 6,000 years ago to the more recent history of industrialization, western society has shifted its view to a competition with nature glorifying human accomplishment.

You can see that in the early industrialization with factories built for manufacturing efficiency and architecture that emphasized scale and rigid shapes. So how have recent buildings like the Google headquarters that emphasize greenery and cocoons come about? How did we go from the photo on the left to the one on the right?

It is an age-old concept that has recently found a new home. Some people track it all the way back to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. For surviving buildings, it really got its start in the Islamic Golden Era (8th-14th Century). During this period, buildings were designed for both direct and indirect contact with the natural world—as they strove to seek out an understanding of the world.

For example, the Umayyad Mosques (Damascus, Syria) built between 705-715 used patterns that were found in nature. While not exclusively used, they were dominant in both art and architecture to avoid the depiction of the human form for religious beliefs.

In this picture you can see the natural patterns, natural light, and natural materials used in the interior of the mosque.

While the structure of this Mosque was built as a fortress for protection, the courtyard includes access to nature and a water fountain. That combination of protection and connection was a catalyst for many breakthrough innovations during this period and was evident across many areas of study such as architecture, art and science.

An excellent example of the use of natural shapes was the symmetric polygonal shapes that pre-dated the principle of quasicrystaline geometry by 500 years, which is still being used by scientists to better understand quasicrystals at the atomic level.

This desire to design and construct something that has taken thousands of years to explain scientifically and design without modern technology is one of those ancient mysteries that baffled scholars.  It only became clearer in 1984, when an American biologist took a radical and interdisciplinary approach to explain how these innovations could have been achieved.

Edward Wilson suggested the theory that humans were driven to seek connections with nature and other life forms. That was the birth of the term “biophilia” or literally, “the love of life” as we understand it today.  This theory integrated architecture and physiology, propagating a new way to conceptualize the design of our build environments and their impact on our physical, social, intellectual and physiological well-being.

Using this new interdisciplinary lens that expanded our historical review of buildings beyond an architecture perspective, studies have concluded that while the term is new, the concept existed in the ancient world, dating back to those Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

What the studies have also demonstrated, but anyone who is standing in a mountain meadow with a gentle breeze ruffling tree leaves and a burbling stream nearby already knows, is that humans crave a natural connection. We simply do better physically and mentally outside the urbanized environments we have developed and closer to the natural environments from which we came.

So, how do you apply thousands of years of history, scientific study, and your own personal experience to your own home? The second part of our blog will give you the context to do that. Look for it shortly.

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