Green ArchiTEXT

Lake | Flato's Bob Harris on Beauty, Place and the Environmental Imperative (VIDEO)

Robert Harris, FAIA LEED Fellow and partner at Lake/Flato Architects, on how to recognize and create beauty and place from an architectural perspective. Aesthetic places bring emotionally connect to human nature. People can enlarge their living experience by becoming aware of the environment – inside and out.

Required Reading: "The Economics of Biophilia" - new white paper from Terrapin Bright Green

Great new white paper just issued by Bill Browning and the folks at Terrapin Bright Green:

Why do certain places make us feel good? Anthropologists tell us we are hard-wired to respond to nature. People viscerally respond to the same relationships in architecture because they make us feel good. These sensations are known as biophilia. Terrapin Bright Green is pleased to release The Economics of Biophilia, a white paper that compiles an economic argument for biophilic design in the built environment.

Download The Economics of Biophilia

via www.terrapinbrightgreen.com

Introducing Zygote Quarterly: devoted to biologically-inspired design

Open publication - Free publishing

NYTimes: Seeing the Building for the Trees

By Sarah Williams Goldhagen

A REVOLUTION in cognitive neuroscience is changing the kinds of experiments that scientists conduct, the kinds of questions economists ask and, increasingly, the ways that architects, landscape architects and urban designers shape our built environment.

This revolution reveals that thought is less transparent to the thinker than it appears and that the mind is less rational than we believe and more associative than we know. Many of the associations we make emerge from the fact that we live inside bodies, in a concrete world, and we tend to think in metaphors grounded in that embodiment.

This metaphorical, embodied quality shapes how we relate to abstract concepts, emotions and human activity. Across cultures, “important” is big and “unimportant” is small, just as your caretakers were once much larger than you. Sometimes your head is “in the clouds.” You approach a task “step by step.”

Some architects are catching on to human cognition’s embodied nature. A few are especially intrigued by metaphors that express bodily experience in the world.

Take the visual metaphor of a tree as shelter. Most people live around, use and look at trees. Children climb them. People gather under them. Nearly everyone at some point uses one to escape the sun. READ MORE >>

via www.nytimes.com

Biophilic Design: The Architecture of Life (Trailer)

Biophilic Design: The Architecture of Life (Trailer) from Tamarack Media on Vimeo.

Designing the Building-Landscape Interface

By Bill Millard

Nature has been prototyping designs far longer than humans have. And as architects strive to keep up with the rapidly evolving world of green-building standards, some of them are looking to exploit that experience by bridging the gap between nature and the built environment. The end goal: creating a functional interface between the two that improves building performance.

In the second half of the 20th century, buildings and landscape became disconnected. Many architects saw nature as an unruly force to be excluded at all costs. Nonetheless, a small but vocal group maintained interest in the interplay of the built and natural environments. And today, architects increasingly see biomimetic and biophilic approaches as practical strategies.

Contemporary systems that exemplify this interplay include green and blue roofs, green façades, living greenwalls, porous pavements, and associated systems for managing water and soil. But putting these green machines to work isn’t plug-and-play; it calls for patient cost-benefit assessment. Well-deployed natural features can improve water management and thermal control and reduce operating costs, but they are not a panacea. READ MORE >>

via www.architectmagazine.com

Future of Real-Time: Networking Nature

Monitoring change in nature can provide insights into both environmental and human change. By connecting the natural world to the internet, communities and organizations are better able to monitor and respond to nature’s ebb and flow in real-time.

Implications

• Wired plants and crops can report on their health and indicate the correct time to harvest.
• Audio sensing can detect minor changes in the environment to warn of avalanches, mudslides or earthquakes.
• Citizens become engaged in creating two-way data flows; use information to better understand their immediate surroundings.
• Communities reconnect with nature and understand their impact better.
• Heightened awareness of natural cycles increases ability to determine long and short term trends.
• Real-time weather information enables businesses to work with nature and minimize inefficiencies.
• Better ablility to monitor invasive species and deal with cross border issues.
• Natural sensors can be used to increase agricultural yields.

READ MORE >>

via www.psfk.com

A School That Connects Kids to Music and Nature

A nursery school in Japan proves that it's never too early to introduce students to the arts.

By Trung Le

Tetsuya Matsui and Tomoko Murata of UZU Architects collaborated with two artists, Shintaro Yoshimura and Naomi Ito to capture the child's world of beauty and wonder in the design of the Ontonoha nursery school. Using the metaphor of a tree with notes, UZU Architecture designed a nursery school that connects children to music and nature.

This connectedness to nature goes beyond the metaphor as the architecture of the nursery is sculpted to gracefully merge into the Earth and create an exterior terrace that connects to the center of learning environment. From any vantage position inside the nursery, the children are constantly connected to nature – to the outside, through the openness and flow of the learning spaces. READ MORE >>

via www.fastcodesign.com

Architect, designer Neri Oxman uses principles of nature

By Julia Ferrante

Neri Oxman displayed an unusual set of images: the well-magnified internal membrane of an eggshell, a three-dimensional magnolia cone and a budding plant.

"This represents all that I am fascinated with in nature," the award-winning architect and designer told the audience at Bucknell University's Trout Auditorium Tuesday night. "Every human and natural form of life on earth has gradients. Any living thing responds to life in motion. ... I am bringing that code and gradient into architecture."

The founder of an emerging field known as "material ecology," Oxman uses these principles of nature to conceive and design "living, breathing" structures that respond to their environment rather than compete with it. She spoke as part of the ongoing Bucknell Forum series, "Creativity: Beyond the Box," which features individuals from a wide range of fields who not only exemplify creativity as practitioners but who also can provide thoughtful and insightful commentary or interactive experiences on new ways of being creative.

...

Rather than choosing a form and manipulating materials to create structures and buildings, architects and designers should look to nature and mimic the structures of such high-functioning objects as an eggshell or a magnolia cone, Oxman told the crowd at Bucknell. Plants, too, are wired to evolve as they grow, she noted. So objects, including furniture and buildings, should be able to do the same.

"When a (magnolia) cone is introduced to high temperatures and moisture, it acts as a seed-dispenser mechanism," Oxman said. "How do we extract these principles from nature and import them in the natural world? Architects and designers usually work from a global form down from the top. Creativity is about being able to think beyond the type of media you are working with."

Oxman argued that architecture is in a "crisis of form," in which form is winning over function. READ MORE >>

via www.bucknell.edu

Building as a Verb: Designing a Building That Works Harder for You

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