Performance The new Biomimicry Center is locally attuned and responsive to its environment and uses readily available materials and energy. Its facilities occupy a fully serviced indoor space, located on the ground floor of Design South, a massive cast-in-place concrete building from the 60s. In order to leverage the building’s thermal inertia, we planned to install a layer of phase change material (PCM) under the first floor slab, to considerably reduce the demand of AC, especially in the morning hours. This solution was complemented with a smart HVAC management system, helping the Center– as well as the whole building--to be more efficient, and produce fewer emissions.
DISCIPLINE
SPRING 2017
With one of the highest solar insolation in the country (>6Kwh/ m2/day. Source: NREL), Arizona’s climate usually forces architects to react against the sun with ‘defensive’ solutions as the small and deeply shadowed window openings in the building. This fact makes the Center’s interior a dark cave where sunbeams are not allowed. The desirable presence of plants and other possible living organisms besides humans, recommended the presence of natural light in the room. Commercial natural lighting systems, based on fiber optic bundles which drive sunbeams indoors, provided the technical opportunity to have a natural light source over every native plant on the DeserTable, allowing them to photosynthesize. This design solution does not only use readily available sun energy; besides evident benefits for humans, it also introduces daylight cycles, and circadian rhythms in an ever-lit and ever-air-conditioned working space. A dimmerized LED lighting system, which uses the resin fins as diffusers, is planned to be installed on the ceiling to provide artificial light to the room. It will replace the existing fluorescent lighting system, reducing the Center’s electrical consumption and emissions, and allowing its users to modulate the light intensity and spectrum, and create customized atmospheres. A Piece of the Sonoran Desert The experience of the Center will be strongly influenced by the natural world. Visitors are drawn in by a soft floor resembling a sand dune. The carpet presents flowing trajectories indicating available paths through the space. Back-lit fins span over the room and create a translucent canopy, similar to a cloudy sky over the desert, providing a soft lighting effect where shadows almost disappear. A horizontal plane floats across the room. The DeserTable’s surface is not completely flat and presents a relief, resembling the characteristic basin and range topography