From designing a detailed picture of the New York Skyline in moss to how we need to design with biophilia to help mitigate climate change this great podcast with Lily Turner explores how we are just starting to realise the very real benefits that Living walls can bring to our cities, and our work and healing spaces.
Lily Turner is an environmentalist, biophilic designer and living wall specialist. She's also the director of green walls at Urban Strong, the design-build maintenance firm offering services for green building technology solutions. In 2013, she co-founded Urban Blooms a non-profit to bring large-scale, publicly accessible living walls to dense urban environments. It was after Hurricane Katrina she was rebuilding homes, restoring landscapes, repairing drip irrigation systems and fields and got to do a lot of great community projects which inspired her to launch Urban Blooms, which aims to bring greenery back into the built environment to benefit people in the community.
We chat about sustainability, how policy and regulation are needed to implement green spaces, and also how “new language and concepts need to be introduced. Sustainability has become rhetoric and clouded our view of our products' actual state of things. So adding to our lexicon is also a major part of it.” Lily also advocates like we do, that it is vital to “break down silos when looking at the built environment. Adopting a more collaborative and holistic approach is the only way forward. If we look at Singapore's journey, I think it represents an actual nice beacon of hope and their government's response should be seen as inspiring to the United States and other major offenders around the world.” Shifting our lexicon from just sustainability to regeneration will also shift people's behaviour and create more awareness.
As well as the political, we speak about how Living Walls and preserved moss walls can be seen as striking forms of art, especially when you add a frame or incorporate colourful foliage, and how they offer a myriad of environmental, psychological and physiological benefits as well.
Lily has been working with Biophilic Design for almost 10 years. It has to be the way forward, it has to happen. “I don't know how we're going to survive without it.”
We also discuss the practical benefits plants bring, from creating relative humidity, especially if they're of scale and how you just feel more relaxed. When you bring that into a high-stress environment, like an office or even a rehabilitation institution it is extremely important. “And I think we'll see this more and more as our healthcare system changes. And our education systems change as well.”
Even a sightline view to the outdoors, we know there are significant benefits, you have reduced stress levels. Direct connection to nature is one of the most powerful of the Biophilic Design Patterns, being surrounded by something natural and green can boost productivity, enhance creativity and cognitive function, and ultimately lead to increased sales so there's also ROI associated with that. “If people aren't sold on environmental or aesthetic benefits, let's look at the ROI and try to push that conversation forward. And then also just having a statement Living Wall in your lobby or office you're communicating this message of progressiveness and sustainability to your investors, your clients, your partners, everyone involved in supporting your company.”
To find out more about Lily and her work visit: https://urbanstrong.com
Her work features in our “Cities” issue of the The Journal of Biophilic Design, it is a case study of multi-sensory living wall that UrbanStrong installed in a corporate office in New Jersey.
https://journalofbiophilicdesign.com/shop/journal-of-biophilic-design-issue-4-cities-ebook
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Credits: with thanks to George Harvey Audio Production for the calming biophilic soundscape that backs all our podcasts.
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