In 1984 the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson published a short book called Biophilia, built around a simple idea: that humans have an innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. The word itself was older. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had used it in the 1960s. But Wilson gave it a biologist’s argument, that we spent most of our evolutionary history outdoors and still carry the wiring.
Biophilic design is what architects did with that argument. It’s become a sales word, attached to anything with a pothos on a shelf. So it’s worth looking at the buildings where it’s real, and at the evidence underneath them, which is better and stranger than the marketing.
The study with the brick wall
The same year Wilson’s book came out, an environmental psychologist named Roger Ulrich published a paper in Science with a deliberately modest title, “View through a window may influence recovery from surgery.” He went back through records from a suburban Pennsylvania hospital and matched 23 pairs of gallbladder surgery patients. One of each pair had a window looking onto a small stand of deciduous trees. The other looked at a brick wall.
The tree-view patients went home sooner, averaging 7.96 days against 8.70. Nurses wrote fewer negative notes about them, and from the second to the fifth day after surgery they needed fewer doses of strong painkillers. Ulrich himself flagged the limits. It was a small sample, and that wall was unusually bleak. But it’s still the study everyone in this field cites, and it’s worth knowing how small and careful it was before it turned into a slogan.
In 2014 the consultancy Terrapin Bright Green gathered decades of this research into 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design, sorted into three groups: nature in the space, natural analogues, and nature of the space. That last group is the interesting one. It’s about how a room feels, the sense of prospect and shelter, rather than what’s growing in it.
Singapore does it at city scale
No country has leaned into this harder. Gardens by the Bay opened in June 2012 with 18 Supertrees, steel structures 25 to 50 meters tall wrapped in living plants, and a Cloud Forest conservatory whose 42 meter mountain has a 35 meter waterfall falling past it. The park was planned by Grant Associates, with WilkinsonEyre designing the glasshouses.
Seven years later came Jewel Changi Airport, designed by a team led by Moshe Safdie. Under a doughnut-shaped roof of more than 9,000 glass pieces, the Rain Vortex drops 40 meters through the middle of a five-story indoor forest that holds around 3,000 trees and 60,000 shrubs. It soft-opened in April 2019. It is also, let’s be honest, a shopping mall. That’s the part of the Changi story people skip, and it’s fine! A building can be a mall and still change how a few million people feel during a layover.
Our favorite of Singapore’s experiments is the least photographed. Khoo Teck Puat Hospital, designed by CPG Consultants, opened in Yishun in November 2010. Its planners turned a bare stormwater pond next door into a waterfront garden and set biodiversity targets for the site. Butterfly species on the grounds rose from three to 60. Sixty-six native bird species now live there. Community farmers who had lost their plots were offered space on the roof. In 2017 the hospital won the first Kellert Award for Biophilic Design, named for the Yale ecologist Stephen Kellert, who worked with Wilson on the idea. Ulrich’s window, scaled up to a whole hospital!
A forest that needs climbers
Then there’s Milan. Stefano Boeri’s Bosco Verticale, completed in 2014 in the Porta Nuova district, is two residential towers carrying about 800 trees, 5,000 shrubs and 15,000 perennials and groundcover plants on their balconies, roughly the greenery of a hectare of forest. It won the International Highrise Award in 2014.
What we find most honest about it is the maintenance. A small team of arborists who also happen to be climbers abseils down the facade from the roof, floor by floor, to prune and check the plants. The press calls them the flying gardeners. Their existence tells you what biophilic design costs once it leaves the rendering: irrigation, structural load, a botanist on call and people on ropes. That’s not a criticism. It’s the real price of a building that’s alive.
Hotels and offices have picked up the language fast, and plenty of what they build is a green wall bolted to an otherwise sealed box. The test we’d suggest is Terrapin’s third category. Does the space give you a view out, a place to tuck in, light that moves through the day? If yes, the plants are a bonus. If no, they’re decoration.
We’ve collected 18 more examples of biophilic architecture, and we covered the Rain Vortex back when Jewel Changi first opened. Closer to home for us, Portland’s new airport terminal has its own timber roof and thousands of live plants.
