By Tom McKeag
What do you get when you throw 60 young architects into a room for 10 days and teach them new parametric software tools, concepts about bio-inspired design, and give them a bunch of servo-motors, sensors and actuators to play with? Well, you get some pretty excited designers, for one thing, and you get some pretty interesting results, for another.
I spoke about bio-inspired design recently to the international participants of such a workshop, Biodynamic Structures, hosted by the California College of the Arts (CCA) and the Architectural Association of London. The purpose of the workshop was to explore the integration of new ideas and technology in the design of better buildings. Can learning more about materials, biology and robotics inspire productively innovative designs? The participants were there to find out in a hands-on approach that included building their own working mechanisms.
Their creations ranged from a ceiling that changed shape when stimulated by noise, to a wall that responded to the presence of people, to a light-activated hydraulic partition, to structural columns that mimicked the distribution of trees and branches in a forest. All were creative and ambitious, and all were developed with that breakneck reflection peculiar to architects in a charette.
via www.reuters.com
