Understanding Biophilic Design for the Living Building Challenge

Yesterday, I was at the Georgia Tech campus, reminiscing on my time there, but more importantly collaborating on a  biophilia charrette for their upcoming Living Building Challenge project.

What is diophilic design in architecture? Biophilia is defined as the inherent human inclination to affiliate with nature. 

Some like Terrapin Bright Green, have taken this a step further by defining the 14 patterns of biophilic design; while others like the WELL Building Standard and the Living Building Challenge have incorporated this as part of their certification. The need for biophilia incorporated into our designs has arisen in the last 200 years, where most of our time is spent indoors. Even when various studies clearly point out a relationship between biophilia and patient recovery time (Length of Stay), biophilia and student engagement (Test Scores), biophilia and employee productivity, what are we still waiting for as architects to incorporate it into our designs?

In a project that I was involved in, we were working with a design team that was introducing a roof garden. Although this would be a great biophilic element for the the building, the landscape designer and the architect were unsure about the amount of sunlight the plants on the deck would truly achieve to make it successful. We ran sunlight studies and worked with the landscape designer to help make plant selection decision based on the varying amount of sunlight different spots on the roof would achieve.

At the charrette, I knew the room was full of high caliber people as we all jumped into a group exercise trying to come up with ways to incorporate biophilia into the current conceptual design scheme. The Living Building Challenge at Georgia Tech is a great step forward to start incorporating these elements of nature within our interior spaces.

About : Pattern r+d, founded in 2014, enables the design of sustainable and healthy building environments and communities by developing and applying innovative tools, processes and education. Pattern delivers highly integrated design solutions that go beyond shallow notions of sustainability to true parametric and performance driven design.