What is biophilic design, and can it save the planet?

Cancer care is, understandably, focused heavily on the technologies of both detection and treatment. While huge improvements have been made in the recent past, however, treatment is still a harrowing and traumatic process, for patients and their families. The Maggie’s Centre charity provides emotional and practical support during this time, in specialist venues on hospital sites. The Maggie’s Leeds Centre, in Leeds, UK, has been designed with communal areas, including a roof garden, inspired by the local Yorkshire woodland and featuring native English species of plants and evergreen, keeping its warmth during the winter months, inside and out.

The Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Stanford, USA, meanwhile, uses biophilic design not just with the planting of wild onsite gardens and seating and play areas, but with wide-open windows and terraces, and the use of natural colours, materials, patterns and motifs throughout the interior treatment, recovery and waiting spaces, too.