Helena van Vliet

Helena van Vliet RA Dipl.-Ing. AIA is an internationally recognized expert in Biophilic Design. She is a Biophilic Architect with 30+ years of construction experience, a Consultant, Researcher, Educator, and Speaker on Health & Well-Being in the Built Environment. Helena is President of Helena van Vliet LLC, President of BioPhilly, and a Steering Committee Member at Biophilic Cities International. She is a member of the AIA Academy of Architecture for Health and a licensed architect in the US and Germany.

Helena considers Architecture a Health Care Profession. Her primary area of exploration is the creation of spaces that consider human evolutionary biological pattern & place preferences and foster cognitive ease, support biodiversity, and positive emotional engagement with place. She views attachment to and caring for place as essential for true sustainability as well as for cognitive and physiological well-being. In her design and teaching, she works with insights from her 30+ years of practice, as well as data from her ongoing research in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, chronobiology, and biopsychology.

Since 2019, Helena has been teaching her acclaimed interdisciplinary seminar ‘Environments for Well-Being’ at Thomas Jefferson University. She invites a diverse group of architecture, landscape architecture, and interior design students, as well as students from the health sciences, to explore the building blocks - and underlying science - of places and spaces that support the causes of health and well-being. Helena’s seminars illuminate the direct connections between personal and bio-habitat resilience, considering building projects as climate-adaptive infrastructure investments in support of public health.

Helena teaches and lectures nationally and internationally at various universities, including The University of Pennsylvania; Drexel; Pratt Institute; the Politecnico di Milano, Italy; and the Bauhaus University, Germany. Her focus is on Biophilic Design, Biophilic Urbanism, and the intersection between architecture, public health, and biodiversity.

As an active Municipal Planning Commissioner since 2002, Helena has advised the governing body in planning, zoning, and conservation development towards sustainable low-impact growth for the well-being of her local community.