enowned for its majestic wilderness and awe-inspiring landscapes, Alaska faces extraordinary hurdles when it comes to bringing green spaces into its commercial buildings. Despite these barriers, biophilic elements are important for Alaska buildings.

“Plants or biophilic elements certainly have their place in every building type,” says Dana Nunn, the director of interior design at Bettisworth North. “How you implement those biophilic elements certainly depends on… climates, daylight, budget, ability to maintain something that’s going to be good versus an eyesore that suddenly starts to undo the good of the biophilic imagery.”

Biophilic design originates from the work of psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who defined biophilia as the “passionate love of life and of all that is alive.” The theory in design has evolved to focus on increasing building occupants’ direct and indirect connections to the natural environment.

The biophilic touches designed into a building’s interior or exterior can play an important role in the health and well-being of those who use the spaces, Nunn explains.

“Research [demonstrates] that they have a positive impact on stress levels, blood pressure, and heart rate,” Nunn says. “All of those things that make people better patients, better students, better employees, better providers in a healthcare situation,” Nunn says.

At least two published studies have also connected plants in the workplace to increased productivity. The studies compared how well people completed “attention tasks” while surrounded by biophilic elements or in barren office spaces. In both studies, those with access to plants or views of nature performed significantly better.

“Long story short, it’s the fact that people want to feel that connection to earth, to nature,” says Sarah Lanners, the sales and design manager for Anchorage-based Green Connection. “When you walk into a building, and there’s plants there, you feel good.”

To get the biophilic benefits, features simply need to be within view, Nunn explains. This presents the option to not only bring plants inside but to open up line of sight to the outside with large windows, as well as incorporate images, materials, and textures that work as biophilic elements within the building.

Mark Kimerer, a landscape architect with Bettisworth North, explains that part of his work is designing the areas outside of a building so that it can directly benefit those inside the building—which is even more important when dealing with the deep, cold winters in Alaska.

“We have a lot of our year where, traditionally, you would gravitate towards the interior of the building,” Kimerer explains.

In those situations, especially when snow blankets the landscape, it’s important to find creative ways to still connect people to what’s happening on the other side of a window. This can be done with dynamic lighting that changes color or casts different patterns on walls and the snow.

“It can really be a cool way to at least view the landscape, even as if it’s from the inside,” Kimerer says. “Those views from the interior outside are always something that we try to work on.”

The plant palette available for outdoor landscaping in Alaska is extremely limited compared to much of the Lower 48, with only a couple types of maple trees and one oak that can survive. In general, Kimerer says that he relies on woody plants—trees and shrubs—that would not do well inside but are hardy enough for Alaska’s winters.

“We really are relegated to using things that we’re confident will work for a client,” Kimerer says, “so, birch, spruce, and plants that belong here.”

While the outdoors has some limitations on what can be done beyond what is naturally growing in the state, indoor green spaces also have challenges. At the top of that list: cost.

Nunn says that for her clients in Alaska, “It’s never penciled out to do a big, significant” planting feature, though there are some examples of successful green walls in Anchorage.

“We’ll often tour clients around installations here in town just so they can see the good and the bad,” Nunn says.

Assessing the costs of a large plant installation starts with addressing the underlying infrastructure that needs to be put in place. Then it’s necessary to factor in the costs of regular maintenance.

The most successful installations are planned for at the beginning of a project, rather than an addition later in construction, Nunn says. In these cases, plumbing will be put in to ensure that the plants have easy access to water and excess water is drained away before it becomes putrid.

Successful projects also have ensured that the plants have good exposure to daylight—not always an easy task in the Far North—and artificial lights that augment daylight during the wintertime.

The last key factor for making a significant indoor planting work is having a standing contract with a maintenance company. Without it, Nunn says, there is often a cycle of maintenance and negligence as employees focus on their primary work. “They just seem to wither away until someone gets fed up and makes it their pet project for a weekend, and they overhaul it and it looks good for a while and then it doesn’t again,” Nunn explains.

Another issue on whether a green wall or interior garden is a good fit for a building comes down to air quality.

“Plants clean the air, but their efficacy in an enclosed environment is largely misunderstood,” Nunn says. In fact, the planting medium—the soil—tends to incubate mold and other air quality challenges.

Kimerer points out that it’s not hard to find remnants of what were once ambitious indoor gardens in lobbies or the main entryways of some buildings in Alaska. “You’ll see what probably used to be a pretty robust interior planting, and everything’s gone,” Kimerer says. Instead of being stacked with plants, there will be a bunch of potted plants sitting in planters.

Larger interior plantings are more realistic for behavioral health, rehab, and medical facilities, Kimerer says.

“You just have to kind of think about the equity of the space based on who might get exposed to it,” he explains.

Nunn says she often finds herself helping clients find alternative ways to integrate biophilic elements in a space.

“We’re looking at views to the exterior, where we can do plants, or working with a client to identify contracts to bring in potted plants,” Nunn says. “Just a variety of other ways we can achieve the goals of biophilia without actually doing a large planting installation.”

Indoors, the plant palette in Alaska is much closer to what can be found in the Lower 48. Kimerer recalls being in a Mexican forest, looking around at the sub-canopy plants and recognizing many of them—plants he sees for sale in Lowe’s and decorating office buildings. Nunn says she had a similar experience when she visited the Amazon in 2021.

“Most of those plants are coming from distant regions: China, Japan, all over the world, really,” Kimerer says. “They’re mostly warm climates.”

Kimerer and Nunn both point out that the amount of humidity the plants need to thrive must be considered when designing a space. Too much moisture inside a building during the winter can cause issues from the inside pressures pushing the moisture into the walls.

Nonetheless, the top plants in Lanners’ palette for commercial spaces are Aglaonema, Dracaena, Sansevieria, ZZ plants (Zamioculcas), and pothos.

“These are great versatile plants that can be either statements or accents,” Lanners says. “Dracaenas come in all sorts of sizes and looks, so you really have a lot to play with.”

Lanners prefers low-maintenance plants. “Commercially, we keep it simple. We don’t need someone to walk into an office and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I cannot believe you have this plant,’” Lanners says. “We don’t want people to see stressed plants, so I like to stick with plants that are a little more sturdy.”

She adds that there’s no need to incorporate plants that are going to drop a hundred leaves when it gets cold out, noting that even indoor plants tend to react to changes in the seasons. “You don’t want to have to think about it. You don’t have to worry about it,” Lanners says. “We want plants in your place, and we want it to be carefree.”

Prior to the pandemic, Lanners says encouraging property owners to incorporate plants into their commercial spaces could sometimes be difficult. This was, in part, due to having so much natural beauty in the state, she says.

Lanners says she was often asked, “Why would they put plants inside when we’re surrounded by all this nature outside?” But, like so many things, the pandemic changed that.

“Interior plants really have taken off this year or during the pandemic. It started with houseplants, and now we’re seeing people return back to work and kind of want the plants in their workspace as well,” Lanners says.

The new challenge is getting plants to Alaska, Lanners says, noting some planting containers are backordered until August 2022. The issue stems from global supply chain issues, as well as pandemic-related stressors on the production side in the United States.

“The availability of the plants became extremely limited. So now we have the demand, but not the product,” Lanners says.

Lanners explains that plants and biophilic design can play an important role in transitioning people back into office space, after they adjusted to working from home.

“We just went through two years of people realizing they could work from home,” Lanners says. “It’s kind of important for managers, property managers, and property owners to understand they might need to invest a little more into their spaces, into their common lobbies and common areas.”

There are three primary factors when deciding where plants will go in a building: access to light, localized temperature of an area, and the surrounding uses of the space, Lanners says.

“For almost any project, we’re trying to capture daylight and views,” Nunn explains. Those two objectives can often be obtained by incorporating large windows into a commercial space. The advantages that come with expansive glass must be balanced against heat gain and heat loss due to the lack of insulation.

“Then space planning comes into play, making sure that we’re being a little bit more egalitarian in how we give that exposure to daylight,” Nunn says. “Maybe putting more general use functions around the perimeter where the windows are.”

Another issue with windows that’s less of a concern in the Lower 48 is privacy. During the winter months, much of regular business hours are in darkness, when passersby can easily see into well-lit rooms.

“Healthcare is a unique one where we have to consider what can you see from the outside, and privacy becomes a concern,” Nunn explains.

Both indoor and outdoor biophilic elements can be used to help create that privacy. The bottom line, though, is that designing spaces in the Last Frontier requires architects and their teams to be aware of the unique pressures of developing spaces in Alaska—and to offer clients creative solutions.

Even though Nunn has yet to have a client choose to invest in a large indoor planting centerpiece, she is clear that finding ways to incorporate biophilic elements into any space is vital.

“As a designer,” Nunn says, “I feel like we owe it to them to bring to light these opportunities.”