Sustainable and biophilic design strategies are not new to healthcare design, and increasingly in this industry, the two strategies are becoming intertwined.

Steven Langston, vice president of design at RLF Architects (Orlando, Fla.), says that both strategies are factors in the health outcomes of the patients, visitors, and staff who occupy healthcare facilities.

Realizing this connection, many healthcare designers and providers are considering sustainable and biophilic design in tandem, he says.

At the 2024 Healthcare Design Conference + Expo, Oct. 5-8, in Indianapolis, Langston will discuss updates to biophilic and sustainable design strategies in healthcare on Sunday, Oct. 6, during the educational session, “E19: Connections, Distinctions, and Merging Trends of Biophilic and Sustainable Design In Optimizing the Therapeutic Healing Environment.”

Emerging trends

One of the trends that Langston plans to discuss is how sustainability goals have shifted beyond the reduction of energy and resource consumption to focus more on restorative and regenerative design. Restorative design is building to reverse damage that has been caused to a particular site while regenerative design is building to create even better conditions to support ecosystems. Langston says both are progressions of sustainable design.

“You’re doing more than just trying to use as few resources as possible. You’re actually trying to generate them,” he says.

For example, the Weed Army Community Hospital in Fort Irwin, Calif., is a net-zero, carbon-neutral hospital, designed by RLF, that produces more power than it uses.

On a healthcare project, Langston says project teams should be looking at more than saving energy on a project. “Can we restore the site if it was a brownfield site? Can we collect more water than we use and actually provide that to the community? I see inklings of this in the [latest] LEED guidelines, which is exciting,” he says, noting it is illustrative of that shifting mindset to restorative and regenerative design.

Advances in biophilic design

When considering biophilic design, the speaker says, design teams have many options, including elements that mimic nature.

For example, on the Mohave Desert hospital project, the design team created an electronic waterfall—a two-story simulation that uses lights, images and sounds to emulate the experience of falling water, he says.

“In the middle of the desert, it’s a place that gets less than half an inch of rain a year, so we knew we couldn’t bring water into the hospital, but this has the effect of an oasis,” he says.

Langston says the project demonstrates the level of creativity that healthcare designers are bringing to sustainable and biophilic design.

In addition to being inspired and motivated by new trends, he says he hopes attendees will walk away from his presentation with a better understanding of the importance and benefits of sustainable and biophilic design on the healing environment. “It’s easier to do than many designers think,” he says.

Find updates and additional information on the 2024 HCD Conference + Expo here.