The work of Bill Browning and Catie Ryan Balagtas of Terrapin Bright Green has long resonated with me. Bill is a founding partner of Terrapin Bright Green, which focuses on sustainable biophilic design solutions, and is a top innovator and strategist in the green building and real estate industry. Catie is the Director of Projects at Terrapin and for over 12 years has been concentrating on environmental and biophilic design, systems integration, strategic planning, and regenerative design.
I recently spoke with Bill and Catie to discuss their exciting new book launching September 2020, Nature Inside: A Biophilic Design Guide, the history of Terrapin, and the evolution of biophilic design, which aims to connect nature to the modern built environment to satisfy our inherent human need for organic connections.
The work of Bill Browning and Catie Ryan Balagtas of Terrapin Bright Green has long resonated with me. Bill is a founding partner of Terrapin Bright Green, which focuses on sustainable biophilic design solutions, and is a top innovator and strategist in the green building and real estate industry. Catie is the Director of Projects at Terrapin and for over 12 years has been concentrating on environmental and biophilic design, systems integration, strategic planning, and regenerative design.
I recently spoke with Bill and Catie to discuss their exciting new book launching September 2020, Nature Inside: A Biophilic Design Guide, the history of Terrapin, and the evolution of biophilic design, which aims to connect nature to the modern built environment to satisfy our inherent human need for organic connections.
Lorraine Francis: Thank you both so much for speaking with me today. As a bit of background for our readers, how many years has Terrapin Bright Green been in existence?
Bill Browning: Since August 2006. I had left Rocky Mountain Institute in 2004, where I had started a group called Green Development Services, then left to be a real estate developer and the Director of Design for a new project in Virginia. And we had a team that completed the design and got all the approvals in place and had the project financed. We were beginning construction when the two families that owned the project went through spectacular divorces, so I went back into consulting. Two friends of mine, architects Rick Cook and Bob Fox, had formed a new firm Cook+ Fox to design the Bank of America Tower in New York and they were getting a lot of requests to do green building consulting. They didn't really have the bandwidth to do it and decided to reach out to me and see if we could partner and create a new entity to do that consulting. So in August of 2006 we launched Terrapin Bright Green.
LF: We have spoken on quite a few panels on our mutual passion, Biophilic Design, and now you and Catie have just released your new book; “Nature Inside: A Biophilic Design Guide.” What led you two to write a comprehensive book on biophilic design?
Catie Ryan Balagtas: We had written other publications in the past The Economics of Biophilia and The 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design being the best known of them. And we had been receiving requests over time wondering when we would be writing an actual book. We were fortunate that RIBA Publishing came to us with this book idea and asked us if we or someone we knew would be interested in writing a book about biophilic design for interiors. So we contemplated it for a while and decided this is something that we wanted to do. We also recognized there was a need for it. There have been a lot of books about theory and practice at a high level and there are case studies out there as well, but nothing that really put it into an applied design perspective. Our emphasis in the book was to bring it down to a really practical level. How can you bring biophilic design into your existing design practice? So we're not introducing a new process, we are adding a biophilic lens to assist with guiding design decisions. It gives designers a newly informed perspective based on health and well being in nature.