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004 Biophilic Masterplans with John Goldwyn WATG
74 Plays5 years ago
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Transcript
Introduction to Green and Healthy Places Podcast
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episode 4 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast with me, Matt Morley, founder of BioFit Nature Gyms and Biofilico Design.
00:00:22
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In this episode, we take a deep dive again into the world of sustainability and wellness in the built environment, specifically looking at master-planned destinations.
WATG's Legacy in Design and Planning
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We're talking to John Goldwyn, Senior Vice President, Director of Planning and Landscape at WATG in London, a business with 75 years of history, delivering master plans, architecture, landscape, and interior design services for clients all over the world.
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when Nobu, Shangri-La, St Regis, Belmonde, Ritz Carlton or Atlantis the Palm and many others
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want to build their next place or space, they call WATG to get the job done. These are industry heavyweights in other words. Originally from Hawaii, the firm is especially strong in large scale real estate projects that integrate nature for its positive impact on both wellbeing and sustainability. And John is the man flying that particular flag in their London office.
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I've known John for a while now and his passion, energy and focus continues to be a breath of fresh air, reminding me that there are people at the apex of the sector pushing the same message around nature-centric, people and planet-friendly real estate.
Biophilia in Real Estate and Smart Cities
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In this conversation, John and I cover how biophilia can be integrated into high-level real estate development strategy and master plans right from the start of a project.
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We look at how sustainable design can contribute to a smart city, how landscaping interventions can help restore native landscape to a tropical island, and the massive upswing in developer interest in pursuing and implementing the kind of green and healthy design ideas that John specialises in. Don't forget to leave a review or subscribe if you like this content. Enjoy the show. Here's John Goldwyn of WATG.
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John, thanks for joining us today. Perhaps we could just get a sense of where you are right now and how crazy or indeed vaguely normal things are looking from where you sit. Thanks, Matt. Well, I'm a senior vice president for WATG, which is a kind of international design firm. We've always specialized in something you're passionate about in hospitality. But my team, which is master planning and landscape,
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really looks a lot more at larger and more holistic projects and what I would say is right now we're in a really good place and the last few months have obviously been very very very difficult on a personal and professional level for many people in the firm
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But I'd say we're kind of looking at things with refreshed eyes, with a clearer head, and I think we're starting to navigate through really where we're going now
Navigating Financial Crises in Mixed-Use Projects
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in the future. I think it's an interesting time, but I would say my general synopsis is that things are pretty good.
00:03:23
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So there wasn't, I can remember very clearly in the last financial crisis where a lot of the sort of long term mixed use development projects that I was involved in, they just sort of went on pause six months before the economy crashed and we couldn't work out what was going on. Did you see anything similar in that sense with client work or did it actually kind of carry on more or less regardless? It would be untrue to say that there weren't some casualties along the way in terms of projects in a similar way to the great
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recession but in another way because of the fact that everyone is all in this and if you like every geography, every market, every person is sharing the difficulties that the world is facing. I think that's meant that we've navigated through this with our clients rather than them distancing themselves from us. So there's been a lot of understanding that the rules have changed but the projects haven't necessarily gone away if that makes sense.
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It does. Well, that's good news, I think. And when you're working on those projects then, so from a sort of planning and landscape perspective, how does WACG put a team together? I mean, are you a constant on a team? Are you cherry-picked according to the nature of each project? And then how do you sort of fit in and integrate into the overall project team? Well, the idea is that when we have a lot of my work, thankfully, is repeat clients. So they know the way that my team works and they know the way that we slot in with our other disciplines.
Master Planning: Vision and Strategy
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The idea is that when, if we say that you're a new client, Matt, and you get introduced to us, the idea is that
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the master planning is a kind of envelope that contains other elements. So we have economists and strategists that sit within master planning and the idea is that master planning sets the broad vision and the broad strategy both economically and spatially in terms of design and philosophy. I like to think of it almost like as a project manifesto the master plan
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And then onto that, you obviously slot in architecture, which is, if you like, the major design element of the buildings and interiors, which are the major elements of the sort of insides of the buildings and the way that they link with the exteriors of the buildings.
00:05:41
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And then landscape design, the other team that I lead, as well as master planning, is the spaces between. The spaces where the buildings interact with each other, the spaces that might be simple gardens, or they might be town streets, or they might be parks, or whatever. So in theory, you have these four service lines being strategy, master planning, architecture, and landscape and interior. Sorry, that's five if you include strategy.
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that all interface with each other and all sort of bounce off each other and the idea really is that master planning as I said is the project manifesto and if master planning is needed all the way through then yes it's a point of continuity sometimes my personal involvement wanes on master planning as landscape is waxing so it's all very fluid and project specific we don't really have a cookie cutter approach to anything we tend to
00:06:35
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do whatever we need to because projects as you know are also different and clients are different and personalities are different and the needs of projects are different as well.
Wellness and Nature in Design
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So you're often working on on sort of fairly large scale mixed use developments where you're basically building literally places not just spaces or interiors and buildings but the entire many towns right so from from that that sort of macro perspective how are you seeing nature and indeed wellness
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using more demand for concepts that deliver on that, rather than just landscaping being an afterthought where perhaps it's sort of upgraded to something more of a primary sales point within the overall master plan. Absolutely, absolutely spot on. We really are. I trained as a landscape architect. My background is in landscape architecture, but obviously leading a team of master planning, there's also a very architectural
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and obviously the strategy team are very important in that as well and it's in my DNA it's who i am as a person and it's the way that i was trained and it's what i've always been passionate about
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permaculture and holistic thinking around systems rather than, you know, rather than designing buildings and landscapes. I believe in designing places using nature as the glue that's sticking them together. And I think that our industry in terms of the design industry, but also more specifically in our niche of hospitality, has really cottoned onto this because so many of the answers are not technological. There's great, great tech out there. There's incredible
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Photo photonics now and there's brilliant water saving forces for the for the rooms and all sorts of incredible pieces but actually if you site buildings correctly. They will do lots of the work for you so for example i'm out of direct sunlight in hot climates and using natural breeze corridors and natural drainage channel so a lot of this i suppose.
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ecological or environmental background to which you refer. It's just good design and it's always good being good design and it always will be good design. Do you think there is
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Because there is this, there's clearly a turn towards, or there was already pre-COVID, I think, a turn towards or an increased interest in biophilia and the role that nature can play in creating a healthy environment. And what I'm seeing is certainly even a sort of a boost in that interest now as we start to come through into some kind of a post COVID era.
Biophilia as a Standard in Sustainable Projects
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Do you think there's any risk that sustainability, possibly even biophilia, biophilic design or nature inspired design could, if you like, almost become
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commodity that just becomes, you know, sort of something that's quite standardized and therefore no longer a point of differentiation and therefore something that could then be excluded or becomes a fad or do you think it'll, can you see that it's actually just going to become completely embedded in how we do things or how WTG do things and it's almost a
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a building a starting point rather than an option. I wholeheartedly think it's going to be I mean I don't mind to a certain level if it becomes commoditized if it becomes embedded because I think that we still as a community of people involved in the built environment we have so far to go. I mean it really is
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It's nascent in big projects to be so aware of these things so i really do want it to become part of every single project that i do and that we do that we all do i don't think that there are any excuses for not doing it anymore there's too much
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Research and too much factual evidence about the fact that we really are running out of resources as a planet and you know things are becoming more difficult and i think that it's really important that we take it as seriously as we are and i think talking about biophilia and.
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I'm a really strong believer that we are connected to nature and I personally I proselytize about the fact that I feel connected to nature I feel better when I'm connected to nature and I think that yes we've industrialized and we've done incredible things as a race over the last two or three thousand years and more recently since industrialization but
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Actually, I feel the benefits, the benefits that hotels will charge you hundreds or thousands of pounds worth for treatments by just being connecting to nature, by bathing in forests, by bathing in clean and natural water. I think this is something that is going to be absolutely huge for our industry. And yeah, it's on the way. And the more that the industry does it, the better. I feel very passionate about that if you can't tell.
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But the challenge clearly then is if you're like always convincing or satisfying the demands of the client so that they're on board with that. Because I think on some level we can all, we all know what that feels like, we all sat.
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in a forest, in a park, on the beach and just frankly watched nature doing its thing and just felt that moment of peace. I think it's sort of almost, I can't imagine anyone wouldn't connect with that on some level, but making the, it's quite a step from that to then committing, you know, large format makes use of developments that fall into line with that philosophy. So is it enough just to sort of present
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what we have in terms of the small amount of research that's out there. How do you convince a client this is the way to go? Firstly, I love nothing more than convincing a client that to do something they never even dreamed was possible, especially if it's not investing more money. It's just thinking differently. And I think
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Often consultants are very lazy in doing what clients ask them to do, which is obviously an important part of our jobs as well. This isn't about ego or arrogance. This is about giving a client an idea or taking them on a journey that they didn't even think was possible. Then the result, when I've done this successfully, has obviously been the delight of the client.
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Again, you say it could be difficult to sell this to I suppose you're thinking about hard nosed dollar driven developers, but sometimes it's just saying to people, look, this space that we're designing between these two towers or this interstitial space between two buildings,
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let's just make a space for people to go and be, just to go and sit. There's no need for them to be using a green gym or a big graffiti wall to express themselves. Maybe program free and actually this liberation is something that's really special. Guess what? It's also really cheap for clients to build simple. I love this idea of people just being able to escape the energy of the city. Cities are fabulous and
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I'm incredible inspiring places but some of my favorite urban space is the places you could just go and sit and just go and be and just if you like decompress from. We have pretty hectic lives and so i guess the way i'm saying it is that often these things for clients don't have to be more expensive they just have to be different.
00:13:57
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It's interesting. I think one of the things that lead and well have both done rather well is make space for that exactly that what you described. The idea of not necessarily always giving a specific purpose to an area or a specific corner of a site, but just letting that connection with nature
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be the sole purpose of that corner or that bench or that pond. How do you think overall, whether the two systems then are out front leading well, are they
00:14:28
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Do they sort of push your work forward and encourage you to find even more creative solutions? Or are they, in a way, hindrances? Or do you find there's any way clipping of the wings? Or is it quite the opposite from the sort of design and strategy perspective? Well, obviously, they're both, if you like, box ticking exercises because they're relating to meeting certain requirements for certain elements. So I'm all in favor of clients
00:14:56
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investing in these systems because it shows a commitment and it shows a starting point. I think it would be extremely misleading to think that just because your project is adhering to these criteria that it therefore is the perfect biophilic and economically sort of
00:15:19
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viable in terms of sustainability. It doesn't, there's not a one size fits all and I've studied so many of these different systems and I love the way that well has a lot about mental health and wellness and lead is obviously I guess the standard because it's one of the older systems and Bream has great
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kudos in certain markets as well. But I don't think that there's a one size fits all global standard for the way I envisage projects. But I would encourage
Eco-Friendly Design in Smart Cities
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any client to undertake them to show their passion and their commitment. And let's be honest, there is a cost uplift on development cost for doing this. So I think it has to be motivated from the right place. But I don't think it should just be kind of extra marketing glitter added to a project.
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If we look at one of your specific projects then just keeping on that sort of green and healthy theme.
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Are there any highlights that you'd sort of bring out from, for example, a project such as the Mont-Schwasi Smart City? I know you're doing a lot around eco-friendly design and integrating that with smart tech. How did that work? Well, it's quite interesting because WATG started our roots in 1945. It's actually our 75th anniversary this year, which is it's a strange year to be having a 75th anniversary, but
00:16:41
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Here we are. We started in Hawaii, and Hawaii is a volcanic island, and Mauritius is a volcanic island. And strangely, there are a few parallels. I mean, they're on opposite sides of the world, opposite sides of the planet. But, you know, geographically and climatically, there are some interesting connections between the two. And a lot of working on the smart city of Mont Choisie,
00:17:06
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was about understanding this sort of notion of what it is like to be a remote island and I think that a lot of our DNA comes as I said from our Hawaiian heritage so we were able to kind of program our brains to be thinking and the fact that Mauritius is you know at face value it's the
00:17:26
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probably the safest country in Africa. It's very beautiful. It has a lot of tourism. But smart cities are all about what's next, what's beyond that. Not for people like you and me, Matt, when we visit, but for the people from the island and for the people who are from Mauritius. So
00:17:43
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There's sort of three main pillars which are live, work and play. And what we had to do to achieve the planning permission and sort of get into the project was make sure that all the three pillars of live, work and play were equally balanced. And to be honest, if you can balance the work pillar, then living and playing is kind of easy for a firm like WATG. So with that in mind, we had to look at the best sustainable technology and
00:18:11
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A lot of things like creating this alfresco lifestyle, Mauritius like Hawaii is a great place to just sit outside and have a coffee or walk down a food street, but at the moment on the island the infrastructure is not there to do that. So we really looked at creating great outdoor space, great
00:18:32
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al fresco dining and great sort of work opportunities for incubating business and things like that. And then the hope is these kind of little connections are made between these sort of small elements. And then all of the city starts to develop around that. So we didn't go in big bang, huge first phase. It's all quite organic and all quite carefully considered. And I know I read that you did a lot of work around
00:19:01
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an attempt to restore the natural landscape.
Reinvigorating Native Flora and Food Security in Mauritius
00:19:04
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So trying to bring the landscape back. It had been damaged or was it was suffering at some point and you did work to bring it back? Yeah, I mean, interestingly enough, all the early settlers from England and from Holland took all of the beautiful native ebony trees from Mauritius and turned them into sailing boats. So Mauritius was denuded of its beautiful natural
00:19:28
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fauna and flora many hundreds of years ago. And really the planting of sugar cane, which is obviously the way that lots of our clients made their living, was essentially a monoculture. So a beautiful diverse ecosystem and biosphere has been removed to create a wealth generating crop of sugar.
00:19:53
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And really, not just on Mont-Schwasi, but on every project that we're working on in Mauritius, we're really now looking at reinvigorating the indigenous flora, because it really is fascinating. Mauritius is a tropical island, and some of the native species are absolutely beautiful. And obviously, because they're native, they need less pesticide. And because they're native, they don't need irrigating so much, because obviously they're used to these climatic
00:20:21
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limitations and these climatic conditions. So we've been working with the Centre for Middle Eastern Plants from the Royal Botanic Gardens on re-understanding how to use native plants in Mauritius to be ornamental plants.
00:20:38
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Now, the Brits, obviously, we've been tweaking and messing around with the plants that we use for many hundreds of years. The Victorians really got very good at understanding that. But it's really just quite a nascent thing in Mauritius, and we're really excited about where it's going. We hope it'll influence the daily life of the people that are actually living and working, you know, the Mauritians themselves, that they'll have a renewed interest in their flora as well. So, yes, it's absolutely one of our most important cornerstones of the project.
00:21:09
Speaker
And so the idea that you'd be restoring, if you like, indigenous species, then the piece that happened in between then would be
00:21:16
Speaker
this process of globalization and effectively man's impact on the planet, right? Where we suddenly start importing and exporting seeds and species all over the world where perhaps they perhaps not necessarily would be under natural circumstances. So it's an attempt on a small scale to take things back to sort of how they were to a more natural state. Absolutely. And also things like food. I'm a big advocate in edible landscape. So you imagine that salad is flown in from South Africa to Mauritius.
00:21:44
Speaker
to me this seems absolutely it's bizarre and it's based on economics and it's based on the needs of the hotels that are there they fly in fresh flowers as well for the hotels and
00:21:57
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These things are not, it's not only crazy in terms of embedded carbon and just, you know, the sort of bizarre nature of that, but also Mauritius is a great place to grow salad. Mauritius is a great place for cut flowers. So we can create local economy as well and also resilience, because again, if there's another COVID situation and you're relying on another nation for your food security, this is not really in line with where the world needs to be in 2020 and beyond.
00:22:26
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So yes, it's absolutely part of the smart city, again, thinking about Mont-Schwasi. It's about having food security and water security at the very heart of the community, rather than having a city which consumes raw materials in terms of food and hydrocarbons. And we're really looking at this notion of the city as an organism that
00:22:52
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Producers its own food that recycles its products and obviously really high up on the list has this incredible al fresco lifestyle as well this this this mental wellness that i think is so important for all of us.
00:23:07
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It's powerful stuff. I mean, in terms of that visionary landscape strategy and the round the master planning and landscaping, what it can do in terms of creating a sustainable future. What typically, if you can summarize, what type of restrictions or barriers are you coming up against working in clients in that regard? What's holding you back? Because obviously there's so much you could do
00:23:28
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What tends to be the key factors that put restraints on
Challenges in Sustainable Projects
00:23:32
Speaker
that? Yeah, strangely Matt, it's often it's government policy. Sometimes our thinking is ahead of government policy. I don't think that governments willfully stop
00:23:43
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environmental change at the city level, but sometimes it might even be that the policy is based on an out-of-date philosophy around something, or it may be based on the protectionism of the sugar industry, so that certain subsidies are in existence or something like that, but
00:24:05
Speaker
It really is about, it's usually government policy and sometimes it's client conservatism because they don't believe, I mean I see it because I've been all around the world, I've seen lots of projects, I've worked for WATG for, I think this is my 17th year now, I've seen a lot of stuff along the way and picked up I hope bits and pieces from different geographies and different places and sometimes it's just having the ability to synthesise all of these inputs and there just isn't the infrastructure
00:24:34
Speaker
in place. I believe that governments need to financially incentivise clients to develop correctly. I mean, a smart city gives a developer all sorts of financial benefits from getting the smart city planning permission, which I think is great. But yeah, I would say often it's government policy and sometimes it's just that developers and landowners are scared to try something different.
The Green Block Project in London
00:25:04
Speaker
So, but then you'd occasionally get a project like, say, the Green Block project in London, where almost the impetus comes from above, right? Where someone like the Mayor of London will put a project out there deliberately provoking companies like WFTG to come up with innovation. So, I mean, that's an interesting flip side to that discussion, right? Perhaps talk us through how you were involved in that and what the proposal was. Yeah, Green Block was a very interesting process.
00:25:30
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We ran an internal innovation competition, which was won by a Turkish girl on my team called Demet.
00:25:38
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And she envisaged a building product that was essentially alive. So you imagine a basic unit of construction that was alive. And about the same time, Daniel Raven-Ellison and the whole National Park City, London as a national park city movement was starting to move up the agenda. And obviously, Sadiq Khan was also starting to really gather people around his vision for a greener London as well.
00:26:06
Speaker
And so what I really tried to do was synthesise all of these inputs into something meaningful and to create a way that we could actually, if you like, retrofit biophilia to London. The idea being that to make really sort of deep change to our streets requires all sorts of planning permission and
00:26:30
Speaker
In a sense, I was more inspired by something like the Chelsea Flower Show, which, although I'm not a huge fan, pops up overnight, sits there for a few days and then disappears again. And the idea being that we could make incredible interventions into our urban realm using planting and recycled materials and, as I said, the sort of biophilic elements to actually change the spaces that people could go and inhabit. At the same time,
00:26:57
Speaker
autonomous cars were starting to move up the agenda and this idea that maybe we didn't need so much space on our streets for parking and what will we do with with with disused parking spaces and all of these kind of things so again so many different sort of zeitgeist elements of the time which i guess was now
00:27:16
Speaker
must be, I guess, three years ago now or something like that, we started to sort of gather around these points to create a sort of philosophy. And what we've ended up with is this, I like to call it kind of guerrilla urban greening, this idea that you can go in and create green spaces and existing spaces without having to tap into the drainage network, without having to get planning permission necessarily, without having to
00:27:41
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and do all the sort of listed building consent and all the things that make projects move slowly. So we're now working with some fairly established landowners in the City of London and beyond to look at how these interventions can actually improve the city for the people who go, who live, who visit and who work there.
00:28:04
Speaker
It's going to take this type of blue sky thinking, isn't it, to make that next step. You sort of have to go quite extreme and then perhaps you'll be pulled back by certain more sort of down to earth factors. But without those giant leaps forward, it's very hard to see how a big substantial change can be made at a citywide level.
00:28:21
Speaker
biggest and we've done a lot of beautiful visuals around this and the biggest compliment is when people play it back to me and say this is I saw this and this is my I share this visual vision for London and then they find out or I say well we actually did that
00:28:38
Speaker
and they're like wow, and that is just such a compliment and it makes me feel so positive and so aware that there's a lot of people who feel the same because even just on the level you can have outdoor spinning classes in these spaces, you could have strawberries that kids, school kids can go and pick, you can have al fresco dining that oh yes by the way it's also socially distanced but that's not what's driving it, it's not this kind of
00:29:05
Speaker
and trying to retrofit social distancing into the city. It's trying to build resilience into the city that is preparing for what we're going through at the moment and all sorts of other Black Swan events that we're not thinking about as well. So I think, yes, it needs some blue sky thinking and it needs people to gather around this. And it's so positive. It's not difficult to gather people around. I mean, we've annoyed a few taxi drivers with some of our visuals because they say, how am I going to
00:29:31
Speaker
Drive down you know this road based on your vision will okay. We can talk about that but generally people are extremely extremely positive about the vision that we're trying to create with green block.
00:29:46
Speaker
I get it. I mean, it's really exciting stuff and we've known each other for a few years and I'm always interested to see what you're up to. It's really great to see the quality and vision behind what you're doing with your team at WATG. So, John, thank you so much for your time today. We'll put the links in the show notes for watg.com, the social media and to the projects we've mentioned. And at WATG Designs. There you go. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.