Biophilia: Step into the Ring

I believe that human beings need to connect with nature, have the ability to disconnect from the crowding humanity, and have plants inside the urban world. This is my personal philosophy, but it has a name: biophilia.

“Biophilia: love of living things and nature, which some people believe humans are born with.” - Cambridge Dictionary, 2020

Do you think biophilia sounds impractical or unrealistic? Or something that you might only see in high-end apartments in Singapore? Today, I would like to present to you a case study from a small city in Florida called Clearwater.

Enter The Ring

The elevator doors part and I am greeted by a wall of lovely framed mosses. Moss is wonderful for low-light situations but needs ambient humidity. It doesn’t tend to survive indoors for this reason. Fortunately, these touchable, springy plants cannot be killed – they’re already dead. But this is still biophilic design; read on.

The mosses reside in The Ring in Downtown Clearwater, a co-working space which is a champion in biophilic design and on the cutting edge of human wellness in the workspace. They love mosses here and every single one of them is dead. They look alive. Each specimen has the correct coloration and texture, and they feel springy under the hand. Due to an interesting technique in the world of plant taxidermy, their sap has been replaced with a preservative fluid which allows them to retain their bounciness. They won’t last forever, but these installations are over two years old and still looking lively in their wooden coffins. The trick is convincing and, far more importantly, it has the same effect as seeing living plants. It is this created effect that matters the most in biophilic design.

Turning from the elevators, a guest does not look directly at a wall and a receptionist. The view is directly through a glass-walled conference room and out into the downtown beyond. This level of transparency is an important part of biophilic design, for few things are more valuable to the great indoors than the sunny promise of the great outdoors. In fact, light was the driving factor in the creation of The Ring.

“[An] interesting thing that people don’t know about the Ring is that the light drove the decision,” says Janelle Branch, project manager for The Ring. “Once we did the demolition and we saw the amount of light coming through the space, we said, ‘Wow, we want to be able to see the light from every corner of this space.’”

They did well. Aside from the mossy elevator lobby, there is at least one wall of windows in every space. Even the co-working area, which is in the center of the building, has its work/light balanced. There is just enough light from the outdoors and overhead lamps to prevent glare on laptops while giving enough lumens to read a book by. There’s enough space for either activity at the co-work’s live-edge table, which is made from a single fallen tree and is large enough to seat eleven people. A little river of moss runs down the middle of it, leading the eye to the gigantic moss-and-wood “painting” that defines the space from reception.

The amount of detailing that went into this place is significant. The cork wall in one conference room was specifically sourced from a Portuguese supplier that practiced sustainable bark harvesting. The non-glue-based binding, combined with the natural cork, releases a distinct smoky scent into the air nearby. The “telephone booths” have walls made of sewn newspapers and firmly sealing doors that prevent phone calls from bothering co-workers. The concrete walls and countertops were made with a custom concrete mix that had no silicate sealers in it (which serves to make concrete denser, but it also potentially off-gasses and is absorbed by food). There is no virgin plastic used in the entire co-work – they even had the plastic knobs on the window blinds replaced with wood by the manufacturer.

The final touch, however, remains the moss installations and the living plants found throughout the co-work. Potted plants are the last necessary element for the overall health of the space, although not for air cleansing reasons. (They use a hospital-grade air purification system, by the way.)

“Our largest installation is in the co-working area, because we wanted to have something that was a little more in your face, a lot larger, to give that sense of inspiration and exhilaration. For me it is a personal experience,” Branch says. She knows that people, “absolutely understand that innate connection with nature and the innate connection with the plant.”

This is true dedication to biophilic standards and all that work will only be done by individuals who really mean to make a positive change in the world.

“A true project of love and nerve,” Branch says of The Ring. “[It’s a] 1974 building, in a very uncertain market and ‘you want to build what? The healthiest work space in the world? What are you doing?’”

All that work, but it worked. The tiny details, the fine attention to each component of what makes up the entire internal environment, created a healthy, beautiful, and in-demand co-working space. The only unoccupied office in the entire building was the one deep in a corner, far from natural light, where neither human nor plant felt they could truly grow.

-K.C.

Next up: Learn about the WELL Building Standard, which provided the guiding framework for building The Ring.