The memory of the day my living wall came crashing down on a client’s conference table during their investors’ meeting still leaves shivers down my spine. My God, the trauma! I was waiting in the hallway of Pinewood Creative’s Portland office for their CEO, Martina, and planned on revealing the photos of the 8×10 plant wall my team had zealously worked on. Over the weekend, I burst my backside during design phase on an installation that should serve as a centerpiece, considering it took me my two’s worth worth of effort creating a stunning mosaic tapestry constructed from ferns, pompous, and prayereams aligned in a manner so that it could be viewed from their glass entryway, so that it framed their logo.
The sound reached my ears before its source appeared on my periphery. The noise of something cracking followed by gasps was soon interrupted by an ear-shattering crash along with what sounded as someone pouring a bucket of water onto a concrete surface. Upon stepping in my office, where I found 12 shock-struck suiting executives I had a senior’s vision indicating their attention fixated directly towards the calamity unfolding astoundingly, my gorgeous construction was slowly moving downwards, bringing soil and water towards what I can only deem an expensive walnut conference table which had fully submerged along with the investor portfolios and the catered lunch swimming in abysmally grimy water, a syrupy mini-drowning.
Martina stood frozen with her mouth agape, partially because of the chaos in front of her and partly due to surprise. “What in the world, Jason? Why is our wall like this?”
As embarrassing as this is, it genuinely taught me far more about biophilic design than a master’s program ever could. The truth is that incorporating nature into the interior of a building goes beyond arranging plants in imaginative shapes – it is fundamental to consider architecture, load and weight distribution, water management systems, and simply put, ensuring your mounting straps are not kidding when they say they support 400 pounds of saturated soil. The design was incredible yet the beauty of my engineering was—let’s just say, it was rather complicated. I did not take into consideration, however, that the “concrete” wall was actually veneer over drywall.
Seven years later, after countless successful installations, I can admit, somewhat reluctantly, that there is a gift in that failure. Almost. Losing a client was bad. Most people relied on my by then ruined reputation for months. I’m still covering the costs of the damage to that shattered conference table. Nonetheless, it helped me radically redesign my strategy for integrating nature into commercial buildings.
My mentor Sarah (_thankfully, she didn’t excommunicate me professionally after that episode_) captured it well when I called her, sobbing from my car at Pinewood’s parking garage: “Jason, you’re designing living systems, not hanging pictures. Mother Nature will laugh at you if you don’t respect the biology and the physics equally.”
She certainly had been spot on.
Reassessing My Interactions With Nature Indoors
I took a break for three months after Pinewood. I returned to ‘the basics’. I went back to self-directed projects in my apartment, like testing smaller modular systems with effective weight distribution. My poor roommate Kyle would come home to find my experiments in rotation, like me suspended from the ceiling challenging the boundaries of gravity, or the bathroom turned into a milder version of nasa’s control center, complete with plastic sheets and humidity measuring tools.
“Dude,” he would say as he sidestepped the living room’s mountain of PVC pipes and samples of growing mediums, “I commend you on your personal endeavors, but I really need to access the shower before my date tonight.”
This pay period’s worth of repeated testing was not in vain, after all. I was able to create a modular living wall system that had weight distributed across many anchor points, added unnecessary critical redundancy for irrigation, and most importantly, could be installed in sections that would remain stationary, even if one section failed. Philodendron avalanches during executive lunches were no longer a problem.
After taking a break from work for myself, my first client was a petite architectural firm down in Southeast Portland. Their request was something modest yet dynamic for the reception area. I was nervous, but wow, I can’t stress how prepared I was. Along with the design, I brought building estimates, moisture and stress monitors, and enough contingency plans to set off a round of contingency chaos.
Miguel, the sole remaining after the Pinewood incident, kept giving me these looks that were a mix of skepticism and pity as I was nervously securing every brace with a strap.”Just so you know, this wall is actual concrete,” he whispered as I nervously continued my fifth test of the anchors. “And it’s just a 4×6 installation. At this point, I think we could hang it with Command strips.”
Mason and I never saw eye to eye on certain things. I stubbornly provided a different set of reinforcement brackets regardless.
That installation has survived three office remodels, an untouched kitchenette fire (thank you very much, my drainage system), and countless personnel alterations. After 6 years, it has become an unofficial staple for the office. I get bombarded with emails from the firm’s founder, Eliza, where she commemorates “still sustaining your precious masterpiece,” adding her special touch of “best investment we made for this space.” One time, she emailed me saying “whatever trauma led you to over engineer that beauty, I’m grateful for it.”
Ah, if she’d only knew
The Scientific Justification For Why This Is Important
The context for biophilic design has always been vague. How frequently have you encountered an article describing plants as pretty? Biophilic designs are simply “nice to look at.” While there’s no denying the accuracy of such claims, there absolutely is research explaining how natural elements affect us on the neurological level. One example is a study done by The University of Oregon, which showed that biophilic design improved creativity by 15% and reduced employee fatigue by 26%. This proves that there’s more to nature than aesthetic appeal — it affects us physically.
Let’s be real — humans evolved outdoors over the course of thousands of generations, meaning our brains were already accustomed to natural environments. For 99.9% of our history, our nervous system had to adapt to features like fractal patterns, soft variations in sound, gentle light, as well as the motion of leaves and water. Suddenly, being put into “perfect boxes” with fluorescent lights? Letting go of our neurological wiring is wishful thinking.
Brightwave Marketing client Teresa learned this the hard way. After transitioning back to the office post pandemic, her team struggled enabling remote adaption workflows. As the workload increased, productivity decreased and complaints surged like never before. From subsidized lunches to post work happy hours, her team tried everything.
“I was desperate,” she recounted over coffee with me last month. “Then I remembered how much I missed my deck garden when I was working. I had these tomato plants right outside my home office window, and I realized I’d spent two years looking up from my screen and seeing something alive move in the breeze. Now everyone was staring at beige walls under artificial lights all day.”
In the broad open area where they are all supposed to work, we added 3 strategic features: three living walls, custom planter dividers between desk pods with selected plants for air purification, and a small water feature to produce white noise to cover distracting noises from colleagues in the open plan office. We also changed overhead panel lighting which has previously been replaced with full-spectrum lighting to emulate natural light better by subtly shifting throughout the day.
If I’m being honest, the results were a bit shocking. They reduced sick days taken by 32% in 2 months, and the quarterly employee satisfaction surveys indicated a 41% improvement in comfort levels within the office. Teresa texted me a productivity dashboard confirming that the Q1 project completion rate increased by 22% compared to last year, and she included the message: “Whatever plant magic you worked, it’s showing up in our numbers.”
With a spin, I think it’s safe to say that plants possess magical powers, and that’s something I strongly stand by. The magic, however, is well supported with scientific claims.
The Manual: How To Get Things Done Without Being Told
Listen, you most likely will never hear this from an influencer: biophilic design plant walls have a few issues, like the fact that they smell. And by ‘smell’, I mean they can smell really weird. Plus, if you are not careful with where you plan irrigation and soil composition, your walls will attract fungus gnats like no one’s business.
After several clients called with variations of ‘there’s a strange odor in our reception area and our clients are noticing,’ I had to rethink my growing medium. I now use a custom blend of activated charcoal with diatomaceous earth and a certain ratio of coconut coir to expanded clay pellets. This blend provides optimal drainage while restricting the growth of bacterium that causes the unpleasant odor.
Let me elucidate on the lighting requirements. The sheer number of beautiful installations that suffered because someone put tropical understory plants in direct western exposure windows is magnificent. Plants definitely aren’t furniture! You can’t simply place them where they look good relative to your design concept and anticipate their adaptation.
The maintenance contracts I offer now include mandatory training sessions for facilities staff and quarterly plant rotations. I learned this the hard way after a law firm on Burnside decimated an entire wall of Boston ferns by heat blasting them from vents below. Seven thousand dollars worth of plants met their crispy brown fate in under a week once someone decided to crank the thermostat without regard for the living beings residing on the wall.
“Crispy brown sadness” is a stunningly accurate description. Explaining this to the office manager elicited genuinely confused reactions. “Like artwork” is a strange phrase, considering these folks can’t identify living organisms.
I ponder that utterly bonkers conversation every now and again and my eye twitches as a result.
The Duality of Man and Nature
A recent project of mine aquired a new face after I began merging smart technology with biophilic design. An “adaptive ecosystem” was designed in collaboration with a local tech startup, where I integrated smart tech with biophilic elements. I had the sensors installed which measured occupancy patterns, CO2 levels, and ambient noise across the workspace.
Now, my fully automated system controls, every day, the water feature’s flow rate, adjusting it to pour over during high-noise periods while restricting it during low-noise periods. The lights are preset and adjust to the various spectrum throughout the day and the temperature is set to one zone throughout the day to encourage movement.
Raj, their lead developer, seemed skeptical at first. “Sounds like you’re using a lot of technology to solve a problem created by technology,” he said, his gaze focused downward towards his laptop, during our first meeting.
While carrying out maintenance checks a few months after system implementation, Raj was found checking irrigation lines. “I owe you an apology for being a jerk when we met,” he claimed, somewhat sheepish. “This system… it has changed my outlook at work. I can’t put it into words, but headaches that have been with me for years are gone.” He continued, “I am sleeping better too. Whatever you did with the lighting, the plants, and the sound— it works.”
This is precisely what I wished more people understood. Technology and nature do not stand in opposition to each other. Employing tech in nature-degrading ways is contradictory, and primitive; using tech to create more natural environments is not counterintuitive—it is our best hope. This is especially true in urban settings.
Pinewood Creative was a disaster I have yet to fully process. After all, what do dinner guests think when no other reason is given but “My designer almost drowned my investors in potting soil—pretty great party story if you ask me.” While undeniably humiliating, attending a dinner in an expensive suit, and shielding my not-so-cheap purse was costing me a career; among other things.
In different terms, the designers of these systems are concerned more about how people interact with spaces as opposed to devising impressive-sounding sustainability credentials. That is whhy biophilic design is centered on creating places where humans can function as the nature-connected beings we are.
If I have to wonder, I still find it necessary to check every installation’s mounting bracket four times. You really only need to make that mistake once.
