Green ArchiTEXT

Putting a Value on Bees, Trees and the Rest of Nature

By Tom McKeag

"Money doesn't grow on trees," our parents told us, and they were right. Trees, however, are essential for making money, and not just because of the paper they provide. More and more, companies are recognizing that the forest, as well as the tree, is essential to everyone's prosperity. After all, we live in a society with a nature-based economy, and the resources that nature provides could not exist without healthy ecosystems.

Resource economists typically depict nature as doing four general favors for us: providing things like food and water; regulating things like floods and droughts; supporting life through basic processes like photosynthesis, soil formation and material cycling; and enhancing cultural things like spiritual refreshment and scientific discovery. Valuing these services is complicated and is done by several methods, like calculating replacement value, or willingness to pay. As resources get scarcer, valuation of these services will become more and more a part of every business.

via www.greenbiz.com

Biomimicry Guild’s Dayna Baumeister says designing a future world without oil is possible

We’re all responsible for the world we live in and we can all contribute to re-designing it to eliminate oil dependency and create a sustainable future. This was the message delegates heard from Dayna Baumeister at the Jan. 21 World Without Oil symposium, a new addition to the Toronto Interior Design Show.

For the bulk of Earth’s history, life has existed without a dependency on oil, and it is possible and critical that we rethink and redesign and recreate our current production system to achieve that state again, said Baumeister, co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild.

She held up biomimicry — defined in its simplest terms as the “conscious emulation of nature’s genius” — as a vital tool in achieving this objective.

via www.axiomnews.ca

HOK, Biomimicry Guild expand use of architectural design based on nature worldwide

By Michelle Strutzenberger

Through the alliance between HOK, one of the world’s largest architectural firms, and the Montana-based Biomimicry Guild, the use of architectural design based on nature is expanding to nearly every continent.

Just this week HOK is looking into solidifying a project which will make use of the biomimicry approach with a client in Brazil. Other biomimetic-based projects are already underway in India, Saudi Arabia, China and the U.S.

HOK and the Biomimicry Guild have been working together for more than a year, and according to HOK director of sustainable design Mary Ann Lazarus, this global expansion is one of the most exciting aspects of the alliance to date.

“I’m always looking for how can we strategically position biomimcry across HOK at different places . . . so I like that we’re starting to see this relationship in every continent,” she says.

“We’re actually going global with bringing biomimicry to our clients.”

via www.axiomnews.ca

Greener Than Oz: Biomimicry Becoming Real in India

The design firm HOK and a major car parts manufacturer attempt to build an industrial city of 2 million from scratch, in India, based entirely on "nature’s principles."

via danielgrushkin.com

Architecture as Nature: the Digital-Botanic Designs of Dennis Dollens

The current issue of Leonardo Journal (Vol. 42, Issue 5, 2009) features a new article by artist Dennis L. Dollens, outlining his ideas on a biology-based procedure for experimental digital architecture. In “Architecture as Nature: A Biodigital Hypothesis”, he writes of theoretical ideas emphasizing biodesign and bioarchitecture's role as part of nature. In addition, “new projects and digitally grown tree/truss experiments illustrate generative, digital-botanic designs integrating biological simulation and/or 3D parametric components inspired by nature."

In part, the piece further explores the historical precedents of Louis Sullivan's System of Architectural Ornament (1924) and Dollens’ own earlier paper in Leonardo in 2005, “A System of Digital-Botanic Architecture”:

“…how visual biomimetics and digital production can present ways to conceive, visualize, generate, draw and model physical forms from natural elements such as shells, seeds, plants, rocks, etc. In particular, the author explains how designs 'grown' in plant-generating software can be deployed in other software and built as stereolithography (STL) models to illustrate a new system of architectural and sculptural design and production."

Go to Leonardo Journal for more information.

Also see Dennis Dollen's Web site, Exodesic.

Art Like Earth Like Architecture: Biomimicry on a Grander Scale?

CREDIT: ALOS/ESA                                         CREDIT: Aqua/MODIS/NASA
CREDIT: EO-1/NASA

Amazing photos found on guardian.co.uk taken by the European Space Agency and NASA. Gives new meaning to the ideas of "Earth Architecture". (top left) The Tanezrouft basin, in the Sahara desert, south-central Algeria, (top right) Fires burned along the coast of Queensland, Australia, and (above) Caldera on the southern end of Onekotan Island, located off the southern tip of Russia's Kamchatka peninsula.

See all 19 photos at “Satellite eye on Earth: October”.

Biomimicry for the Built Environment

As part of its new online feature Ask Today's Expert, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) offers a daily discussion forum on a variety of topics. Today’s host (9/1/2009) was Sherry Ritter of the Biomimicry Guild on “Biomimicry: the eco-design revolution”.

I asked Sherry what she sees as having the most promise with biomimicry in terms of design and materials.

Her answer:

“Here are a few opportunities in green architecture that we think are exciting for incorporating biomimicry:

1) Ecological Performance Standards (EPS). What if a community provided the same ecosystem services as the native habitat? We can study the native habitat, determine some standards that we want to meet, standards like the amount of carbon sequestered, the amount of sunlight reflected, the amount of water captured from rain. Then we can study the local organisms to learn how they have adapted and how they contribute to the ecosystem services. With that knowledge, we can design our buildings, landscapes, and hardscapes to do their share. This type of thinking is just unfolding now, and examples of implementation should be readily available in the next few years.

2) Novel materials like Calera cement or PureBond are revolutionizing how materials are made (process). These products have shown they can be sustainably produced and lower CO2 or toxic emissions common in buildings. Some of these materials are already on the market, like PureBond or Lotus technology for windows, but they typically take anywhere from 5-20 years to bring to market. But when they do hit, they make a big impact. Keep your eyes peeled for new types of adhesives, and “tough” materials that use local processing in the next few years.

3) I’m also looking forward to a time when buildings harvest their energy from the sun or wind. With the innovations taking place thanks to looking to nature for inspiration, we’re getting more efficient and easier to solar cells and wind turbines that don’t require high, steady winds.
There, I limited myself to three of the most promising innovations. There are a lot still that nature can teach us and more and more people are doing what we call “quieting our cleverness” and taking the time to observe and learn.”

Sherry Ritter

Janine Benyus Talks Biomimicry

Great new video of Janine Benyus presenting last month and just posted to TED.com. She updates the audience on her Biomimicry Guild’s latest discoveries in “Biomimicry in action”:

• A U.S. cement manufacturing company is using CO2 as a building block in concrete, borrowing the ‘recipe’ from plants and organisms that make shells and coral
• A new kind of solar cell based on how a leaf works is self assembling and can be put down on any substrate
• A new software program used to make bridges lightweight and building beams lightweight, based on the algorithm used by trees and bones are constantly reforming themselves along lines of stress
• Creating a ‘synthetic tree’ – which relies on capillary action and transpiration to pull water up, a drop at a time – as a kind of wallpaper on the insides of buildings to move water up without pumps

Biomimicry Gone Bad!

   CREDIT: AP

Hilarious piece in the August issue of Wired, where writer David Wolman presents his “10 Worst Evolutionary Designs” – nature’s concepts perhaps we shouldn’t mimic in our green buildings. Examples he gives include the sea mammal blowhole, the giraffe birth canal, the human stomach, and the narwhal tusk:

“The unicorn-like protuberance on a male narwhal's head is actually a tooth that erupts through the front of the jaw and keeps on growing, up to 9 feet.”

Then again, the single-spiraled tusk of this arctic whale may yet hold some design inspiration. Worldwide, it’s long been considered the "other" ivory by conservationists and just in demand on the black market as African elephant tusks, while efforts at protecting both species continue to mount. Since 2000, narwhal teeth and their associated structures have been the subject of study by researchers in cellular biology, anatomy, marine mammal science, dental medicine, evolutionary genetics and mathematics. See Narwhal Tusk Discoveries to learn more.

Who knows, maybe we’ll see narwhal tusk-inspired fiber optics cabling?

Biomimicry Explained

SOURCE: Popular Mechanics

A nice but somewhat general introduction to the design ideas behind Biomimicry in this month's Popular Mechanics (October 2008):

"An airplane systems engineer, a shower designer and a biologist walk into a Costa Rican rain forest.

'This is the neatest thing I’ve found this week,' says the airplane engineer, from Boeing, pointing to a cluster of daddy-longleg spiders gently oscillating on the trunk of a banana tree. 'There must be some unique muscular elastic element in their legs sensing vibration and amplitude. There could be really important opportunities here for a low-energy sensor or mechanical actuator system.'

The group ambles on, stopping next at a 150-ft.-tall ajo tree with weeping vines and thick buttresses – the kind you might see in a natural history museum diorama. 'These roots are circumferentially distributed, so the tree’s strong in any direction,' notes the shower designer, from Kohler. 'These buttresses also have a nice gradient to the ground. When we want to reduce stresses in mechanical design, we try to gradually transform one shape into another – nature’s already done that here.'”

Read the rest of "Nature Inspiring Green Design for Planes, Trains, Autos & More"">here.