September 29, 2025 
Sandy Hodge 
4 Minute Read 
Modern medicine excels at treating symptoms but often overlooks a fundamental truth embedded in our DNA: humans are designed to thrive in environments rich with natural qualities. Hospitals and care homes that integrate nature aren’t indulging in luxury—they’re addressing a basic biological need.
The Kronstad District Psychiatric Centre in Bergen, Norway, exemplifies this principle. Its living façades, green atriums, and rooftop gardens offer patients not just visual relief but moments of privacy and dignity—a stark contrast to the sterile concrete terraces found elsewhere.
Beyond Trend: The Science of Biophilic Design
From Darwin’s evolutionary theory to contemporary environmental neuroscience, evidence confirms our bodies and minds are attuned to nature’s rhythms, textures, and variability. Circadian light cycles, dynamic temperatures, natural scents, and soundscapes like flowing water directly influence our hormones, sleep patterns, stress levels, and recovery rates.
Research spanning from Nobel Prize-winning studies on internal clocks to Roger Ulrich’s landmark 1984 “View Through a Window” study demonstrates that natural environments reduce stress, accelerate recovery, and improve clinical outcomes. Yet modern urbanisation has stripped away much of the nature we evolved with, confining us to spaces our biology isn’t designed for—creating what is called “bonsai humans,” constrained versions of our fuller selves.
Thinkers from René Dubos and Erich Fromm to Edward O. Wilson and Stephen Kellert have warned that disconnection from nature erodes not only health but creativity, empathy, and meaning. Richard Louv’s “nature-deficit disorder” captures how children raised indoors face developmental constraints. Wilson takes this further, suggesting children in completely artificial environments are like “feedlot cattle”—content but not fully themselves, missing opportunities to develop their innate curiosity and exploratory nature.
Designing for Human Nature
Healthcare design should honour our evolutionary programming while deepening medical empathy. Planning a hospital or a care home offers a rare opportunity to embed ecological thinking from the blueprint stage: conducting biodiversity surveys, employing integrated design approaches, and engaging teams skilled in both living and built biophilic environments.
Dr. Anna Bengtsson emphasizes matching design to patient needs—from serene, easily navigated gardens for fragile patients to more stimulating natural environments for rehabilitation. Projects like Herzog & de Meuron’s Basel Rehabilitation Hospital and the forthcoming New North Zealand Hospital integrate landscape views, natural materials, and green roofs not as decoration but as therapy.
A Human Right to Nature:
International frameworks increasingly recognize the connection between environmental and human health. UN Resolution 76/300 affirms the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, though it falls short of declaring immediate access to local nature as a human right.
The Biopolis Global Manifesto goes further, declaring equitable urban nature access a universal right and calling urbanisation without biodiversity “a form of desertification.” It envisions cities co-inhabited by plants, animals, and humans—echoing zoo legislation requirements for species-appropriate habitats. If we grant animals the right to natural environments, shouldn’t we extend the same to ourselves?
Prescribing Nature
Medical professionals hold unique public trust to champion “green prescriptions”—as seen in New Zealand, England’s NHS, Canada, and Japan’s shinrin-yoku (forest bathing). These nature-based therapies reduce stress, improve mood and cognitive function, and aid recovery from conditions including PTSD.
Climate resilience offers another pathway for healthcare facilities. Green roofs and walls manage stormwater, reduce urban heat islands, filter air, and support biodiversity. Rewilding hospital lawns into pollinator meadows reduces maintenance while enriching sensory experiences. Initial resistance, as seen at Norway’s Sunnaas Rehabilitation Hospital, often transforms into appreciation once people witness seasonal cycles and pollinator activity.
Long-stay facilities housing patients with limited mobility can particularly benefit from increased nature access. Kronstad’s rooftop gardens prove that security needn’t mean prison-like enclosures. Even simple interventions—like providing maps to existing green spaces—can guide patients and staff toward restorative environments.
Healthcare workers themselves need protection from nature deficit. Walking meetings, outdoor dining, indoor plants, and commuting through green corridors can offset stress, improve cognitive function, and reduce medical errors.
Conclusion: Systems Thinking for Healing Environments:
Reductionism gave us modern medicine’s miracles but also created environments that undermine well-being. To heal both people and the ecosystems we depend on, we must view health as co-creation with nature. Hospitals can transcend mere treatment centres to become microcosms of the world we want—biodiverse, dynamic spaces that resonate with our evolutionary heritage.
As René Dubos warned in So Human and Animal, uniform surroundings breed uniform thinking and stifle our biological richness. Instead, doctors, architects, and policymakers should craft healing environments that acknowledge our natural origins—spaces where medical art merges with the genius of life itself.
Contact us now for ideas on greening up your facility.
