If it seems like Humans are naturally drawn to green walls and nature settings –that’s not wrong. That feeling is real. This feeling is the basis for an area of study called biophilia, or biophilic design that we see integrated into more and more building designs.
Humans evolved in the larger context of the natural environment – not a built environment. We evolved in nature – so it makes sense that we would find certain nature scenes particularly relaxing. Biophilic design works off of this fundamental biological reaction.
In life, chaotic situations and conditions whether traffic or stress at work actually activate humans “fight or flight” response in our brains. There is a lot more to it than just that obviously, but boiled down to the basics: stress and chaos make us want to be elsewhere.
Stress also causes us to lose our ability to focus on detailed tasks. In general – I think we can all agree we want to reduce stress and chaos in our lives to a minimum and put ourselves in relaxing situations.
It turns out that nature and the patterns of nature have been scientifically shown time and time again in study after study to positively affect human neural activity and to reduce stress, lower heart rate, and blood pressure – to help people feel relaxed.
These are really important things that directly affect a building’s occupants ability to work effectively, yet so often the importance of incorporating nature into a building gets lost in the mix and become a side item during the design phase. As a result, it often doesn’t get as much attention as, say, reducing power consumption or water usage, which are all important issues. But isn’t the performance and comfort of the occupants important as well?
What if you could positively affect all of these things at the same time: power, water usage, and even indoor air quality while also making built spaces a happy place for our tenants and customers? In a nutshell – that’s exactly what we are trying to achieve with green walls.
This article from CNN Business details a few more reasons to consider integrating nature and living walls into your built environment. To learn more, please contact us at GreenWall Source to set up an initial consultation or Lunch and Learn to get further into the details of living walls.