William Browning, BED Colorado University, MSRED MIT, Hon. AIA, LEED AP, is the Managing Partner in Terrapin Bright Green, an environmental strategies research and consulting firm. Browning’s clients include Disney, New Songdo City, Lucasfilm, Google, Marriott, Bank of America, Salesforce, Interface, JP Morgan Chase, CoStar Group, the Inn of the Anasazi, the White House, and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Village. Browning was a founding member of the USGBC Board of Directors.
He is co-author of Greening the Building and the Bottom Line (1994), The Economics of Biophilia (2012, 2023 2nd Ed), 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design (2014, 2024 10th Anniversary ED), Human Spaces 2.0 Biophilic Design in Hospitality (2017) and Nature Inside, A Biophilic Design Guide (2020). His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Elle, Popular Science, and in segments by NPR, Reuters, CNN, and PBS.
Michal Matlon: How did you start your practice of biophilic design?
Bill Browning: I started a green building practice at Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado in 1991. We were collecting case studies on early green buildings and seeing surprising gains in worker productivity. The literature at the time suggested these outcomes shouldn’t be attributed to the building itself, but rather to management changes. Yet, we kept finding more and more evidence that the buildings themselves were making a significant difference in people’s lives.
Eventually, at the end of 1994, we published a paper called Greening the Building, the Bottom Line. It featured eight case studies showing increased worker productivity in various building types.
Following that, we joined a group that secured funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to examine the effects of moving 700 factory workers from a windowless box to a new, daylit facility surrounded by a restored prairie landscape. This was designed by William McDonough for the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller. One of the researchers brought in to guide the process and set up the hypothesis was environmental psychologist Judy Heerwagen, a pioneer in the field of biophilia.