Designing for How We Feel - Robert Hopkins on Biophilic Architecture

What happens when we stop designing buildings only for what they do, and start designing them for how they make us feel?

For architect and sustainability leader Robert Hopkins, it is a question that has shaped more than 25 years of practice. From the Spine for the Royal College of Physicians to the extraordinary forest at the heart of the Thrive Health and Wellbeing Centre in Salford, Robert’s work brings together sustainability, health, nature and people in ways that feel both deeply considered and surprisingly intuitive.

His journey began at university, when a group of students watched the Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham being demolished to make way for another shopping centre and thought: “This is absolutely potty.” They wondered whether there was another way, and set up their own sustainability studio, exploring the reuse of buildings and the environmental issues that mattered to them.

That instinct to question the obvious has stayed with him. Initially focused heavily on building performance, Robert says that around ten years ago he began to refocus his efforts on a different question: how do people actually feel when they are in these really interesting buildings?

That shift towards people and health has become central to his understanding of biophilic design.

“For me, biophilia was actually about accessibility,” he explains. Not whether people can physically get into and around a building, but whether they can access it neurologically: whether they can feel comfortable, feel themselves and feel happy in the space.

“It was actually just about taking a step back and thinking what really makes people feel really good somewhere.”

The Spine, in Liverpool, became an extraordinary opportunity to put that thinking into practice. The building was developed with the Royal College of Physicians, a client that challenged the design team to provide evidence for the decisions they were making. Robert introduced the WELL Standard, but the process quickly became something much deeper than collecting accreditation points.

Because the College’s own members and fellows had authored much of the medical research underpinning the standard, Robert and his team were able to speak directly to the people behind the research — and challenge it.

Although both The Spine and Daphne Steele have both achieved WELL platinum, “we weren't actually that bothered about the score that we got at all,” he said. Instead at each stage, his team kept asking why it mattered to pe