For a long time, I have practiced biophilic design, so the concept of the biophilic pavilion is dear to me. A pavilion is, by definition, an open and adaptable space. When infused with biophilic principles, it becomes a sanctuary where architecture and nature meld into one, creating a built environment that simultaneously gives us the experience of an edifice and a natural space. Unlike the stylized tree at the center of the Minnesota pavilion, a biophilic pavilion must serve as a bridge between people and the natural world, both literally and metaphorically. It must offer protection (sheltering us from the elements while celebrating that we are alive) as well as provoke thoughts of—and re-connections to—the natural world around us.
Biophilic design is something I have been working with for more than 20 years. One of the first lessons I learned was that nature is not to be conquered or controlled; it’s something to embrace and harmonize with—something that millions of years of evolution have hardwired us to do. We’ve had the privilege of working on a range of projects where we’ve seen biophilic design work its magic—for us and with us. But perhaps the most magical moments have occurred with our pavilions, where the interplay among organic forms, natural materials, and surrounding landscapes creates an immersive experience.
Pavilions, whether situated in an urban context or a natural one, are stops in our lives where we can take a moment to reflect and be still. The pavilions that architects build add another layer of meaning to their role as public spaces. Adding even more meaning is the biophilic public pavilion—almost a contradiction in terms.
One project that still resonates with me is the pavilion we designed at the center of an urban park. The buildings of the city surround it, but the space inside this sudden change in the urban landscape is as an oasis—nature restored. The structure of the pavilion may not have been much to speak of, but with trees and timber sourced locally, the free-standing nature of the structure, and an assemblage of green living walls, the pole structure stood in for the trees that grew all around and beyond it. It wasn’t quiet through the living walls and the native grasses that filled the edges of the space; it was loud with life. Entering that space was entering the wild, which, of course, was the whole point.
When designing biophilic pavilions, I have always adhered to the fundamental tenets of biophilic design. These principles go beyond the mere incorporation of natural materials and speak to the integrative use of light, air, water, and, quite essential in the coastal context, wind. The sensory experience is crucial. For instance, when we designed a coastal pavilion, we didn’t just let the local engineers take over. We worked with them to use the sea breeze to its very best advantage, letting it flow naturally through the structure. The pavilion is situated close enough to the water for visitors to get the full brunt of the salty surge—but, more importantly, it is such a multisensory environment that the visitors can really feel the wind and get the full “immersive experience.” And that, I would argue, is very much the point.
The forthcoming section will explore a few of the essential principles and strategies that I have found to be incredibly valuable while designing biophilic pavilions. These principles can be adapted to a variety of different settings, both natural and built, with excellent results.
The Fundamentals and Approaches for Creating a Biophilic Pavilion
Over the years, I’ve found there are several guiding principles that the best biophilic pavilions tend to follow. These principles ensure the design is truly rooted in nature. Obviously, this doesn’t mean simply using wood in place of steel or sprinkling a couple of plants around the structure. A really holistically designed environment speaks to our inborn connection to the natural world. Below are some of the core strategies I employ when designing these unique structures.
Give Natural Materials Top Priority
The initial step in any biophilic structure’s design is choosing materials that are not only natural and sustainable but also sourced from nearby locations. In a recent project to build a pavilion in the mountains, we used stone from a quarry just down the road and timber from local forests. Not only did these decisions greatly diminish the needed transportation of materials (and consequently reduced the carbon footprint associated with the building), we also feel that using these particular natural materials helped us to better tie the structure into its surroundings. It is a basic tenet of biophilic design to help a building feel at home in the landscape, rather than as some imposition against it.
One particular project comes to mind where we worked with rammed earth—a method of compacting raw soil into thick, dense walls. The outcome was a pavilion that fit as perfectly into the desert landscape as if it had always been there. What’s more, it was cool and comfortable inside, even in the summer, without needing much A.C., which served to prove a point I like to make in class about natural materials—how they can work in ways that are both sustainable and responsive to climate challenges.
Establishing a powerful bond with the environment is the first part of biophilic design. A biophilic pavilion should not have the feel of an enclosed box but instead should have some of the qualities of open-air architecture. The ideal pavilions allow for sights, sounds, and even smells from the natural world to come inside. I favor two methods for achieving this effect: either big openings on the walls or slightly open sides of the pavilion to let passersby and nature come inside and to give the occupants a way to get a front-row seat to the show.
In a coastal endeavor, we built a pavilion that sat in between two contrasting environments—a seaside and a dense forest. The side facing the sea was almost all glass, making the view of the ocean almost an art piece in itself, undisturbed and uninterrupted. The side facing the interior was not closed off but instead largely open, with a few massive columns holding up the structure, a few more allowing it to breathe, and a plan that (with the help of nature) made no sound on this side as people entered. On either side, one could not help but hear the nature soundtrack—waves crashing in time with the wind on one side, leaves rustling in the breeze on the other.
Design With Water Elements in Mind
Water serves as a central element in biophilic design. Its very nature is calming, and its presence dramatically heightens the sensory experience in any space, let alone a pavilion. Be it a simple water feature dominating the design, a pond, or a play of water integrated elsewhere, people gravitate toward it in an instant. It provides an immediate, primal connection to nature. Drawing on work from past projects, I tend to favor making water the central design element in my pavilions. In one such pavilion, I created with a team of students, gentle streams of water ran right through the middle of the half-open, half-closed pavilion space. The sound of trickling water, complemented by bird song and slight breezes rustling leaves, emphasized that pavilions exist to provide spaces of peace for the humans pressing against their nature.
Design at Its Heart: Natural Light
Natural light is another key design element of biophilic architecture. It’s not enough to just place a few windows. The design must ensure that the light flows dynamically through the space, changing with the time of day and the season. In many pavilions I’ve worked on, I’ve employed skylights or strategically placed openings to allow sunlight to filter through. In one urban pavilion we built, we designed a perforated roof that allowed dappled sunlight to filter through, mimicking the light you’d experience under a tree canopy. Not only did that add visual excitement to the structure, but it also reinforced our connection to nature. Most of the people who experienced that pavilion lingered longer; they tended to soak in the changing light and the tranquility of the moment.
A biophilic pavilion connects with its environment in more ways than one. While there are many forms of biophilic design, they all share certain traits. Plants are a fundamental component. Yet a biophilic pavilion isn’t merely about potting a few plants or slapping on a green roof—it’s about biodiversity. It’s about the life that the forms and surfaces of a pavilion can support, from the top of a green roof to the guts of a wall assembly. It’s about the presence of the right kinds of plants that will, over time, create the right kinds of habitats for all kinds of life forms. And it’s about the presence of the right kinds of forms in the right kinds of spaces that will, totally by accident, create habitats that a diversity of species from all across the spectrum will call home.
Finally, a biophilic pavilion ought to be flexible and adaptable. Nature is never static, and a structure that can respond to environmental changes or serve a multitude of functions over time is bound to have much longer-lasting impacts. I’ve always maintained that pavilions should be designed with future growth in mind, allowing for not just plants, but spaces themselves to mature and evolve as necessary, with or without the kinds of changes that Elkhorn Built Environments so feared. Accompanying these kinds of changes shouldn’t be a half-hearted nudging nature might give us in late autumn or early spring; rather, our pavilions should be nudged by the significant changes in temperature, intensity of light, and moisture that accompany these truly natural seasons.
Biophilic Pavilion Projects in the Real World—and the Transformative
Their Design Can Be A Chance Encounter Last summer, with my toddler in town for a three-month visit, I learned firsthand how much influence a pavilion can exert. When my wife and I took our little one to the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, I felt as if we had been invited into a biology lab after a time when I had spent too many hours in sterile environments. The pavilion is where a coming together of biology, art, and natural history takes place.
The Urban Oasis Pavilion
One of the most powerful projects I worked on was the pavilion in the middle of an urban environment. It was located in the heart of a city park, surrounded by concrete buildings and busy streets. The objective was to create a refuge—a place to escape the rigors and stresses of urban life and reconnect with nature. I took the idea of a “forest in the city” as my main source of inspiration. It gave me the concept of using tall, slender timber columns to mimic the trunks of trees—an almost vertical forest. It suggested a way to use a canopy-like roof that would give tremendous shade at the same time that it filtered down “dappled” sunlight—sunshine that would make it seem almost like a natural space. I had a hunch that it wouldn’t just be a nice place to look at, but—thanks to the timber structure and the use of a variety of plants, including vertical gardens and climbing vines—something you could actually rather enjoy crossing through on the way to your next appointment. After all, how many appointments can you imagine making inside a living room? The pavilion has become a prime gathering place for folks of all sorts—young and old—who are living life inside the urban core and needing a time-out refuge.
2. The Coastal Pavilion: Embracing the Elements Another unforgettable project unfolded on the coast, where we had to craft a pavilion that would draw in visitors to take in the ocean’s undiluted beauty—up close and personal, without the intermediary of a wall of glass. But for us, this wasn’t just an exercise in making a scenic overlook. We knew the real test ahead of us was how to allow people to experience this kind of elemental purity while also protecting them from the elemental fury that could just as easily engulf them out in the open. Could we create a form that would offer these kinds of physical and visual experiences without being stupid, reckless, or unsafe?
The project I loved most allowed me to engage deeply with all my senses. I could feel the wind, the way it rippled across the skin of my arms and legs. I could hear, with the careful timbre of a half-closed shell, the sound of the surf, a steady and calming rhythm that was, somehow, both close and far away, an illusion of intimacy in what was actually pure distance. I could even, if I tried hard enough, force my mind to go along with the act of simple sensory mimicry and remap from memory what I supposed was required to experience the full-bodiedness of a damp, salty breeze. Pavillion design? Biophilic design? Both powerful ideas—narratives I’d thought interesting enough to pay attention to and, in turn, pay for. Both dealing very much with the primacy of natural experience.
The Nature Reserve Visitor Center My most rewarding design project might just be the visitor center I created for a nature reserve. The purpose of the shelter—a term used intentionally because the space serves as both an educational setting and a refuge for visitors—was to protect visitors in the exposed area while simultaneously preparing them for the kind of “wild” experience they might have as they traverse the reserve. The reserve is located in an ecologically fragile area, so the shelter’s design needed to be informed by the best principles of biophilic design. In addition to seeking LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification for the building, we wanted it to serve as a model for how architecture can more deeply connect people with the natural world.
This project had one of the most rewarding outcomes: it helped instill an even greater appreciation for nature in reserve visitors. They would spend precious moments sitting quietly just inside the pavilion, entranced by the sight of birds and insects performing their daily rituals. Even more gratifying were the times when visitors, after observing nature in action, would set off along one of the reserve’s many trails to learn more about this or that plant or animal that had drawn their attention. This is what education in biophilic design can accomplish. It can inspire reserve visitors to engage more deeply with their environments, using the knowledge they gain to help conserving it. It might do the same for you and me if we were to make the biophilic design tips and tricks described here part of our daily lives.
The Modular Pavilion is a more recent project in biophilic design. The concept explored was that of modularity. Pavilion design here is not a one-off event but rather something that can be added to over time. The pavilion currently exists; however, it was initially a small structure that could be reconfigured or expanded. We were in a botanical garden, where the pavilion could work as either a tiny event space or as a timber-structured reconfiguration of, say, a stage. Both scenarios are possible because of the pavilion’s flexibility and the way in which its adjacent environment can accommodate a range of activities, including more meditative and “quiet” uses that don’t conflict with larger events.
The modular structure allowed the pavilion to respond to the natural conditions of the environment. As the surrounding plants matured and changed, the pavilion could be adjusted to create a more shaded area or open up a new view. This ensured that the pavilion remained relevant and functional over time, no matter how the landscape around it evolved. The lesson I took from this project is that adaptability is a key principle of biophilic design. No matter how they change, natural conditions offer life-sustaining resources. Following that precedent, our built environments should mimic those life-giving conditions, adapting and flourishing in kind, whether we are present or not.
Biophilic design has a journey, and I have taken it with my projects over the years. I have become more and more perplexed by what impact these nature-inspired pavilions, with their bold structural engineering and stunning architecture, can have on the way we perceive our relationship with the natural world. More than mere structures, I see them as transformational, inviting “mindful” reconnection with the world outside our doors. It strikes me that whether installed steadfastly in the center of an urban space or sitting on the raw edge of land and sea, the biophilic pavilion has power—to transform the very place it occupies, to “enrich lives,” to tease out a connection between people and the planet. I see that as essential right now.
