Topic: Welcome to the "Biomimicry and Architecture" Forum
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Hello everyone. As one of this forum's "coaches" I thought I would introduce myself as a practicing Landscape Architect and Planner, who also teaches bio-inspired design at the university level in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many of my best students have been architects, and the profession has been quick to adopt the banner of "green" and the now thoroughly branded term "biomimicry" in their explanations of their work.
The courage that architects often show in creating a vision of the future may be the best hope for the rescue of the planet and the breaking wave of popularity of biomimicry is very gratifying to all of us who have been spreading the news. The popular notions of the subject, however, can sometimes be a bit scary! I recall a recent web article gushing about giant lily-pad solar collectors floating on an urban river. Yes, they were shaped like lily pads and, yes, they have solar cells on them, but beyond that, I still don't see where any principle of form,system or process inspired an innovative solution. Indeed, the rush to put this organic form in the urban landscape seemed counterproductive, since these channel-blocking pads were surrounded by several square miles of unused building rooftops! One can't help but contrast this with Joesph Paxton's solution for the Crystal Palace in 1851, which did indeed come from a genuine knowledge of the structure of the giant amazonian lily pad and a studied translation of the PRINCIPLES learned to his building design. Put another way, Paxton went BEYOND METAPHOR. Today, an article from the Wall Street Journal came across my screen: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124050414436548553.html "The Green House of the Future" and it specifically mentioned "biomimicry" as one of the concepts inspiring designed form. Four brand name architects were asked to do a little dreaming and, to be fair, were not held to the practicalities of implementation or economy. My first provocation for this forum is this: Did these architects go BEYOND METAPHOR? |
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Well I was really excited to read the article and see the designs. Simply put Im surprised at the designs and maybe more surprised at the names of the projects. I think one Ted Talk from Janine Benyus may have changed what they came up with. Like she said domestication is a bit old. I just keep thinking of a former professor saying the word pastiche.
The architects definitely should get a huge amount of credit though. Fact is they are the ones out there getting sought out by the Wall Street Journal. I wonder if they had any biologists, scientists, educated environmentalists etc. on the team to come up with the designs. I would love to see the designs that come from that collaboration. |
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Our friends at EcoGeek have also latched onto the Wall Street Journal article and have some things to say about, what, exactly, can be considered green development within the current context of suburbia. They also echo some of your concerns, BioChemArch. Here is the link:
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/2731/66/ |
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This is pretty interesting: Building Re-Skinning Competition run by zerofootprint. The goal of the Zerofootprint Building Re-Skinning Competition is to advance the state-of-the-art in retrofitting existing built spaces through better design and improved materials and technology, thus creating retrofitting systems that can be scaled to a large number of buildings and deployed globally. See http://communities.zerofootprint.net/building-re-skinning-competition/
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It is interesting that Tom brings up the issue, and oft used technique of metaphor in design. Metaphor is a useful strategy for ideation but can be overplayed. It may be interesting to look at what authors in the social sciences such as Ian Hodder have written about this. See Chris Tilleys Metaphor and Material Culture edited volume, from 1999. Ian Hodder has also gone into the notion of strong and weak metaphors in science and artifiacts in many publications, such as his Interpreting Archaeology, from 1995. This may help to inspire us to go Beyond the Metaphor.
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Thanks, David Benjamin, for those references to metaphor and culture. I look forward to learning more!
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