Welcome to our deep dive into Biophilic Design, where we explore how to integrate biophilia into architectural projects through established guidelines and standards. Today we are pleased to host Alessandra Parolini, an architect, and Bettina Bolten, an expert and consultant in Biophilic Design.
Alessandra Parolini: Good morning everyone, I am Alessandra Parolini, I am an architect and today I am here with Bettina Bolten, an expert and consultant in Biophilic Design, and today we will talk about if there are any standards or guidelines for incorporating biophilia and Biophilic Design into projects.
Bettina Bolten: Hello Alessandra, you are introducing a very important topic because we have said that Biophilic Design is an applied science so we really rely on scientific data. There are various protocols, I must say over time some have proven results, some results are valid from a scientific point of view, others a bit less but we have guidelines available and if you want I can give you a brief overview of what exists.
We have already talked about Stephen Kellert who is the father of Biophilic Design and his very important work that dates back to 2008 where he first gave a rather complete, quite complete framework, a systematic work of Biophilic Design. He talks about two dimensions of Biophilic Design, one naturalistic organic and then a vernacular one, divides the topics into six thematic areas and then identifies as many as 72 attributes of Biophilic Design.
Bettina Bolten: Well, it's a bit complex because I must admit that being him an ecologist he understood, let's say, a bit less about architecture clearly and he therefore started from his from a biological base of evolutionary history, of psychology and evolutionary biology and identified a whole series of attributes based, obviously, on many scientific studies from other fields other scientists. He did a wonderful job, however, I must admit, difficult to apply because some of these topics overlap too, are interconnected and it becomes extremely difficult even to interpret them for an architect interior design.
For this reason after 2008, in 2014 a U.S. consulting firm based in New York, Therapy Right Green, identified 14, they call them patterns or models of Biophilic Design, they published them within a brochure that is also easily found on the internet. They translate, let's say, these studies by Kellert into a more applicable key because they are actually designers. It's an empirical approach, so based on experimentation and examples. They also added a 15th pattern in 2020. Anyway, this is work that is closer to the practice of the designer.
Afterward, Stephen Kellert in turn involved an architect Elizabeth Calabrese, also American, and they did a sort of cleanup, let's call it that, among the 72 points and made a protocol of 24 Biophilic Design attributes, divided into three thematic areas:
This happened in 2015, then in 2018 a posthumous book by Stephen Kellert comes out, who had been deceased for two years, where 25 topics are published but it does not give great news compared to the previous work. And then, now, I must be a bit self-referential, we come me together with the biologist Giuseppe Barbiero with whom we have conducted a lot of research in these areas. We have developed, starting in 2019, a protocol, a model, we call it a model which is a work in progress still. We have arrived at ten topics, starting right from the evolutionary psychology, to apply Biophilic Design.
Bettina Bolten: Let's get into it then here is the list:
I hope I haven't forgotten anyone.
Bettina Bolten: I don't choose it, but I'll tell you. Since we have to stay within the scientific field and I certainly told them to you in an order of importance, but it was not a coincidence if I mentioned the first theme is light. Light is absolutely fundamental to keeping us healthy. This we should tell many architects and many authors of work because statistics say that many workers do not have access, at all, or poor access, to natural light. This affects not only productivity but also the health of these people.
Bettina Bolten: Yes, it's a topic that, moreover, had not been explicitly addressed by any of the previous protocols and at one point we began to think about it. For us, or rather for our ancestors, using the sense of smell was fundamental to understand if there were dangers in the environment. Something, perhaps, decomposing. They needed to know. It is also one of our oldest senses and perhaps also one of those least explored. If we think, for example, when we enter a hotel room the first thing we notice is precisely the smell, before anything else. Or when we go to an environment that has a smell that refers to positive experiences that occurred during childhood, we remember it and we notice it right away.
Alessandra Parolini: But by the way, on this topic, I think we architects may have underestimated it. People who sell houses a bit less! In the sense that, in America, I remember they used to cook pies before Open Houses just because people associate the taste, the scent of the pie, with something very very intimate. They also stimulated the purchase with the senses.
