Design Biomimicry
Biomimetic Office Building section cgi Source: Exploration Architecture
temperature to be used as a source of free cooling in summer and free heating in winter. When the team turned to the building’s exterior skin, the design ideal emerged from a careful identification of functional requirements. The main desire was again to optimize the use of daylight – partly for human health, and partly to reduce energy usage. Daylight varies enormously in brightness from zero at night to 20,000 lux on a bright day, but inside, a reasonably steady level is required for working. The team also wanted to minimize heat loss that would otherwise demand an additional source of energy to warm the building during winter months. The ideal identified was a highly insulating and transparent skin with a layer of movable photovoltaic leaves that could allow in exactly the right amount of light, converting all surplus light into usable energy.
58 | Spring 2017
Developments in 3D printing offer the potential to get even closer to the efficiency seen in biology because there is no cost penalty to complexity in additive forms of manufacturing. The next stages of the project explored the use of complex genetic algorithms to further refine the optimizations between a wide range of criteria. These software tools essentially replicated the process of evolution at greatly accelerated speed, demonstrating the changes which organisms underwent to fit their respective ecological niches over aeons.
- whether it is generating energy, finding clean water, reducing waste or manufacturing benign materials – there are precedents within nature that we can study. All those examples will run on current solar income, and there will be a closed loop in all their use of resources. As with any period of dramatic change, the early adopters of new ideas and new technologies are likely to be those that achieve the greatest success.
Biomimicry offers enormous potential to transform our buildings, products and systems. For every problem that we face
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