Green ArchiTEXT

Bringing Buildings to Life

Could buildings imitate living organisms? Negin Imani has created a tool translating natural thermoregulation strategies into architectural solutions.

Building on the theory of biomimicry, an approach using natural-world strategies to solve human design challenges, Imani’s thermo-bio-architectural framework (ThBA) takes the many ways animals and plants regulate body temperature as a starting point for a roadmap to design energy-efficient, sustainable buildings.

“Evolution has solved many of these challenges, so where better to find innovative design solutions,” says Imani.

“Studying the structure of polar bear fur, feathers, and skin can motivate designing artificial surfaces capable of collecting solar radiation efficiently. Or consider our own blood vessels and the way they expand or contract to manage heat transfer with our skin.”

In a building, this could mean flexible pipes moving a heated fluid to where it is needed: in a roof-mounted solar collector for heating water, geothermal floor heating, or in the walls to retain heat. This use of capillaries is common to both animals and plants, but Imani sees plants as a better model for buildings because neither can uproot and move freely about.

“Plants can move some degree to increase the amount of light they absorb, and this same approach could be used in a house that shifts according to the sun or seasons,” says Imani.

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Biomimetic Design Means We'll All Be Living A Bug's Life

By Jimmy Stamp

Firefly (Photinus pyralis) (image: wikimedia commons)

When I was a kid I had a “bug box” – a small, homemade container built from wire mesh and a couple pieces of wood. During the summer I’d try to fill this box with lightning bugs –fireflies or glow bugs, depending on where you’re from– in the attempt to transform the small translucent container into a natural lantern full of the insects whose biological incandescence was nothing less than a minor miracle. It never quite worked as I imagined. In, retrospect, the whole endeavor seems like a fantasy fueled by too many cartoons.

Or perhaps not.

Recently an international team of researchers looked to the firefly for inspiration in designing more efficient lighting. Building on previous research into the chemical reactions that powered the glow bugs’ glow, the team focused on the insect’s exoskeleton, which features unique shingle-like surfaces that reduce internal reflection, thereby allowing more light to escape. Using lasers to recreate the shingle shapes on the surface of an LED, the researchers were able to create a 55% more efficient LED. This is only one of the many, many ways that insect biomimicry is improving our products and our lives.

Biomimicry is a design principle that looks to reproduce systems, behaviors, or effects observed in the nature. After all, what we stupid humans have been working on for a couple hundred years –at best!– nature has been developing for eons. READ MORE >>

via blogs.smithsonianmag.com

A Manifesto for Rejuvenative Technology: Sustainable Stewardship, Nature Mimicking Designs

By Joss Tantram

Rejuvenative technologies are behaviours and technologies that support, borrow from, utilise, work alongside or benefit from the Earth’s natural productive capacity. They may include recognised sustainable stewardship and production techniques, nature mimicking design, sustainable and net positive biological production, or the as yet emerging “lifelike” natural manufacture.

Our economy, our engineering and our technology must become both explicitly and inherently rejuvenative, to make a manifest contribution to the abundance, vitality and productive capacity of natural capital upon which they rely. Such an approach has a number of obvious benefits: READ MORE>>

via www.sustainablebrands.com

Zygote Quarterly: Why Don't Solar Panels Look Like Trees?

The Evolution of Biomimicry | ARCADE

By Allison Kudla

Bio Design by William Meyers surveys recent design and art projects that harness living materials and processes, presenting bio-integrated approaches to achieving sustainability, innovations enabled by biotechnology, and provocative experiments that deliberately illustrate the dangers and opportunities of manipulating life for human ends. 

Bio-light. Gas chambers filled with bioluminescent bacteria. Part of Microbial Home—a prototype design project by Jack Mama, Clive van Heerdan and Phillips Design, Netherlands. The design concept is for a series of biodevices for the home aimed at creating an ecosystem for filtering, processing and recycling wastewater, sewage and garbage. Image courtesy of Philips Design.

As the first publication to focus on this new phenomenon and closely examine how it fits into the history of architecture, art and industrial design, this volume surveys this shift and contextualizes it through comparisons to previous historic transitions in art and design practices, clarifying its implications for the future.

What inspired you to write Bio Design: Art + Science + Creativity?

I was inspired through studying the history of architecture and design at the School of Visual Arts in the master’s program in design criticism. My thesis project, which I developed with the help of the faculty and with the input of fellow students, became the basis for the book. Also, I was inspired by my own discoveries while becoming an amateur brewer and baker, in learning how to utilize yeast to make my own bread and mead.

One could say that human beings have been altering nature for centuries. However, biodesign brings to the forefront the idea that now is a unique time in human history for these types of interactions. What reasons might there be for a paradigm shift in this direction at this moment in time?

I think there are two factors driving this shift that are most important: The first is that frequent and fundamental advancements are occurring in the field of biology. READ MORE >>

via arcadenw.org

Genius of Place: What Can Nature Teach Us About Managing Stormwater?

Biomimicry and Agriculture: Sustainable Solutions Inspired by Nature

Due to its inescapable relationship with the earth and natural ecosystems, agriculture offers ripe grounds for testing the potential of biomimicry to transform our world into a cleaner, healthier place. The Biomimicry Institute 3.8 is currently keeping tabs on a number of food- and agriculture-related biomimicry projects in its AskNature database. These include a closed-loop Colombian coffee farm system that takes inspiration from tropical and soil ecosystems to repurpose 99.8% of the coffee plant that typically goes to waste in the coffee-making process and turns it into a mulch with which coffee farmers grow shiitake mushrooms.

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Perhaps the most promising case study of innovators imitating nature in order to solve agricultural issues is the Land Institute’s Natural Systems Agriculture project. Here, the Land Institute is using prairie ecosystems as a model for food production in which natural systems and processes obviate the need for pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, and similar inputs. Specifically, they have been experimenting with wild, deep-rooted perennials like mammoth wildrye and maximilian sunflower in an effort to develop a polycultural agriculture system in Kansas that mimics natural prairie ecosystems. READ MORE >>

via www.foodpolitic.com

How Does Nature Conserve Water? Biomimicry Student Design Challenge Winners

Biomimicry Receives Cooper-Hewitt's Design Mind Award

Janine Benyus and Biomimicry 3.8 was recently recognized with the Design Mind Award as part of the Smithsonian/Cooper Hewitt National Design Awards program. Congrats!


NDA 2012 - Design Mind - Images by Cooper Hewitt

Genius of the Biome: HOK Continues to Explore Biomimcry for Buildings

In collaboration with the biologists at Biomimicry 3.8, HOK designers explored innovative, place-based solutions to water, energy, materials, social and economic issues that were inspired by local flora and fauna of the temperate broadleaf forest in a new report called the Genius of the Biome.

CREDIT: HOK

Genius of the Biome describes the strategies and designs adopted by living organisms found in a worldwide region of similar climate and vegetation. It describes the biological principles and patterns common to organisms and ecosystems within a biome. This biology is then translated into design principles that can be used to inspire innovations or identify more specific criteria for place-based design. READ MORE >>

via www.hok.com