DESIGN WITH

NATURE

Biomimicry studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems. It uses an ecological standard to judge the 'rightness' of our innovations. After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned: What works? What is appropriate? What lasts? And finally it is a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it.

Janine Benyus observes that the biomimeticist's notebook can be summarized by the following commandments:
Nature runs on sunlight Nature uses only the energy it needs Nature fits form to function Nature recycles everything Nature rewards competition Nature banks on diversity Nature demands local expertise Nature curbs excesses from within Nature taps the power of limits.

Name of project Vila Olimpica Location Barcelona Country Spain Dates 1989 - 1992 The Canadian-born architect Frank Gehry has long incorporated fish-like forms into his buildings. The fish has several meanings for Gehry. It reminds him of the carp his grandmother would serve at the Sabbath dinner, and it was a good shape to test the capabilities of the early software for computer-aided design. But above all, it serves as a self-imposed reminder to avoid boxy architecture. The fish have become grander in Gehry's work over the years, developing from a sculptural element into largescale engineering structures.

Name of project Uluru-Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre Location Uluru-Kata Tjuta Park Country Australia Dates 1990 - 1995

The design for this Australian aboriginal centre was developed in workshops with the local people. The creation myth of the Anangu describes a battle between two snakes, Kuniya and the venomous Liru. Rocks in the landscape are said to represent followers of the vanquished Kuniya, while the red stone denotes the blood of battle. Burgess observed the hand gestures of an Anangu woman telling this story, and these inspired the snaking form of the building.Various animals that serve as totemic symbols for this community are incorporated into the form of the building, though this is done in an abstract rather than a literal way.

The architect and critic Michael Sorkin is interested in animal forms because they challenge architectural conventions. Whereas buildings are often symmetrical and almost always static, a moving animal is neither of these things. Projects such as the Beached Houses shown here explore this apparently fundamental difference. The three houses, called Ray, Carp and Slug, have a similar arrangement of rooms on two floors. They are based on animals that are 'symmetrical but only until they wiggle'. 'Our effort is to measure the space between the fish and the wiggle', says Sorkin, 'This is the study of a lifetime.'

Name of project Beached Houses Location White House Country Jamaica Dates 1989 - 1991 [unbuilt]

Name of project Reyes House Location Oakland, California Country USA Dates 1991 - 1993 The conservatory roof of the Reyes House is made up of a pair of fibreglass panels modelled on the wings of a dragonfly. The wings may be hinged open on fine days. This was the first built example of Eugene Tsui's 'evolutionary architecture'. He defines this as 'an architecture that implements the evolutionary practices of nature as a synthesis of billions of years of evolution applied to the immediate needs and circumstances of form, function and purpose'.

The nautilus is a mollusc related to the squid and octopus. Its shell is perhaps the most beautiful of many natural forms based on Fibonacci's sequence. Each number in the sequence is the sum of the two preceding numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 ... If you draw lines of these lengths radiating like the hands of a clock, their outer ends trace a spiral. The spiral appears in the plan of Wilkinson Eyre's multiplex cinema. The client required 20 theatres with different seating capacities, which the architects have placed in order of size, radiating off a central lobby.

Name of project Multiplex Cinema Location Merry Hill, Dudley Country England Dates 1998 - [on hold]

Needing to rebuild its sea defences, the town of Morecambe saw an opportunity for broader redevelopment of the seafront and announced an architectural competition. But nothing could have prepared the council for one of the entries it received. Birds Portchmouth Russum responded with a scheme based on four colossal constructions fashioned after the local delicacy, Morecambe Bay shrimp. Dotted along a coastal boardwalk, the buildings were to comprise a marina, amusement arcade, theatre and lifeboat station.

Name of project Seafront Redevelopment Location Morecambe Country England Dates 1991 - [competition scheme]

Name of project Darwin Centre Phase 2 Natural History Museum Location London Country England Dates 2001 - 2007 The Darwin Centre, Phase Two, nests an opaque, rounded form within a transparent, box-like envelope. The architects saw the rounded form as purely sculptural at first. Gradually, however, the metaphor of a cocoon inside a glass specimen container became inescapable. As the project developed, the architects were forced to modify their initial design. It had been based on a smooth plaster finish, and they found that this might crack. This led them to run steel reinforcing bands around the central form, giving it a woven appearance more than ever like a cocoon.

Name of project The Menil Collection Museum Location Houston, Texas Country USA Dates 1982 - 1987

The Menil Collection Museum, designed by the architect Renzo Piano, incorporates many elegant details. The roof is spanned by a system of triangular trusses (running back to front in this picture) and vertical trusses (side to side). These support rows of curved concrete baffles, designed to admit only diffuse light. Working with the engineer Peter Rice, Piano moulded the steel castings that make up each truss into bone-like shapes. This further reduced the overall weight without loss of strength.

Name of project Butterfly House Location Godalming, Surrey Country England Dates Moving through the house is like taking a trip through the life of the insect. The planted area leading to the 2000 - 2003 main entrance is designed to encourage butterflies to lay eggs and caterpillar development. A steel-ribbed walkway wraps around visitors, like a chrysalis.The organic imagery of the stairs evokes the unfurling of new wings. Handrails of entwined rod and cables extend like legs and antennae. Above the bright conservatory space, coloured fabric canopies flutter like wings drying. The terrace is shaded by fluttering wing-like fabric canopies, layered according to shape, colour and opacity

Name of project Waterloo International Terminal Location London Country England Dates 1988 - 1993 Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners' Waterloo International Terminal must respond to many forces imposed upon it. This means that the building must be able to flex upward and downward, and also sideways. The terminal arch achieves this flexibility using a system of glass panels. Fixed at its upper edge, each panel is free to slide over the adjoining panels along its other three edges. Although the movement is tiny compared with that of an animal, the design solution is like that adopted by scaly creatures such as the highly flexible pangolin.

The division between the living organism and the machine continues to collapse,' More precisely, architecture's relationship to both of these other entities is in the process of being renegotiated The triangle of organism-machine architecture was completed by Le Corbusier with his concept of the 'House-Machine', and by the many from Semper through to Frederick Kiesler who have favoured organic analogies in architecture.

Name of project Grafton New Hall Location Grafton, Cheshire Country England Dates 2001 -

Grafton New Hall is a reworking of the old theme of the English country house, taking into account contemporary social and environmental sensitivities. Ushida Findlay's design dispenses with the grandeur that traditionally signifies dominion over the land and the local peasantry. Instead, the low-level design blends with the landscape. Radiating limbs house guest bedrooms, a swimming pool, a cinema and so on. The plan is determined by the position of the sun at the time when each space is likely to be used. Occupants follow the sun during the course of the day - as in many a traditional country house, in fact.

Name of project M&G Ricerche Research Laboratory Location Venafro Country Italy Dates 1989 - 1991

This project for a laboratory for M&G Ricerche had to house areas for both heavy and delicate research, and be adaptable to future shifts in the balance of these requirements. Samyn's solution was to erect a huge tent sheltering flexibly planned one- and two-storey laboratory "buildings" and heavy plant. The membrane structure is not simply an extruded sleeve, but, stretched over a series of gently rising and falling spaceframe hoops, tapers at each end to form a caterpillarish enclosure.

Name of project Swiss Re Headquarters Location London Country England Dates Foster & Partners' design for 30 St Mary Axe makes a distinctive addition to the City of London skyline. 1997 - 2004 The 40-storey tower is, says the architect, 'the capital's first environmentally progressive tall building'. The unusual form is both a consequence and a symbol of this fact. The building's shape, structure and ventilation scheme all find a parallel in the class of sea creatures known as glass sponges. These have delicate, elongated exoskeletons. They filter nutrients from water they suck in at their base and expel from a hole at the top, just as Foster's tower circulates air.

Name of project Bridge of the Future Location [competition scheme] Dates 1998 The Bridge of the Future was a competition to design a hypothetical bridge. The architects David Marks and Julia Barfield took inspiration from the massive cantilever in the tail skeletons of the largest dinosaurs. This pedestrian bridge, designed to span some 200 meters, is also a cantilever - its tip merely touches the ground, with all the support provided at the broad base end. From here, cables stretch like tendons along the bridge in an arc, pulling the huge steel 'vertebrae' into a giant spine. Like a tail, the structure can flex in response to the weight of people crossing it, or to the sideways pressure of crosswinds.

In 1998, the architects Wilkinson Eyre were asked to design a warehouse for a dull retail park. Their initial thought was to make an eye-catching, amorphous 'blob' of a building. But the cost soon forced the architects to move to a perfectly round building. The squashed spherical shape soon began to resemble a sea urchin. As in a sea urchin, it is symmetry that permits the use of repeated, identical structural components. Wilkinson Eyre chose to accentuate the similarity by inserting small spacers at regular intervals between the building's outer cladding and the waterproof membrane below, giving the building its pimply appearance.

Name of project Retail Warehouse Location Merry Hill, Dudley Country England Dates 1998 - 2000 [unbuilt]

Name of project Milwaukee Art Museum Location Milwaukee, Wisconsin Country USA Santiago Calatrava's architecture is marked by its conspicuous engineering and expressive use of Dates concrete. In his recent addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, he uses a series of concrete beams to 1994 - 2001 form a massive cantilevered sun-screen, or brise-soleil. The dramatic structure, which may be read as a bird with wings outspread, or as a whale's tail about to disappear beneath the water, has become a powerful symbol for the museum and its city. The gallery interiors are equally zoomorphic. This vaulted white arcade resembles the ribcage of some bleached carcass, or the enlarged gills that the basking shark uses to filter its plankton diet.

'In what style shall we build? There is the problem of what to call the style, however Organic has lost its precision, and tends to be applied loosely to anything with a few curves. Labels have been proposed such as 'biotechnic' or 'technorganic', but these imply a restrictive dependence of biological form upon technological means.

Biomorphism, a term
coined during the Art Nouveau period, remains more specific than 'organic', but suggests that it is only shape that matters, whereas it is also. patterns and mechanisms of building use and operation derived from biological models that interest a number of architects today.

Change in architectural fashion for one image -conscious client is a bellwether for a huge shift away from the mechanistic towards the biological in aesthetics and cultural rhetoric. Businesses no longer speak of re-engineering, but of adaptation and evolution, and everything from film to fashion to fine art is obsessed with life science. Paradox biologically, the automobile industry is in the vanguard this shift, using the full range of visual media to insinuate a connection between machine and nature. Advertisements for cars now routinely feature bio logical images, from dolphins to DNA, while Britain the well-known geneticist Steve Jones has appeared on television to promote the 'genetic engineering' of the Renault Laguna.

Art Nouveau faded because it required too much design time, expensive skills and custom components and the same might be said for the concrete expressionism of the 1950s). Today, computers promise to alleviate these difficulties.

Christopher Alexander writes; 'When we look at the most beautiful towns and cities of the past, we are always impressed by a feeling that they arc somehow organic. This feeling of "organicness," is not a vague feeling of relationship with biological forms. It is not an analogy. It is instead, an accurate vision of a specific structural quality which these old towns had.... and have.'

There is no moral imperative for this new architecture. Just because it seeks to follow nature does not mean that it is 'right' or pre-ordained. But as Aristotle observed, if there is a better answer to a problem, then nature has probably already found it. It is now up to architects and biologists, technologists and engineers to find those answers too.

In particular, machines are adopting increasingly biological means of operation , The term "biological means of operation" refers here to self-replication and development of computer-generated forms, opening the prospect of an architecture without architects.

WHAT IS BIOARCHITECTURE? The noun bioarchitecture comes from the union of the Greek word bios (=life) and architecture, to underline the association between health safeguard and engineering competence

GREEN ISSUES
Policy issues arising from concerns about the "environment. Various environmental problems arise from economic activity and in particular from economic growth. These include climatic change due to excessive usage of fossil fuels, deforestation, erosion, extinction of plant and animal species and loss of biodiversity, and health problems due to air and water pollution, radiation, and excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides. There are serious doubts as to whether economic growth at present and prospective rates is sustainable, or whether it is leading the world towards massive catastrophe.

GREENHOUSE GASES
Carbon emissions tending to increase the proportion of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the earth's atmosphere. This is believed to have a greenhouse effect, decreasing radiation of heat from the earth and causing temperatures to rise. This could cause climatic changes, and raise the sea- level by melting part of the polar icecaps. It has been suggested that this could be prevented by introducing carbon taxes to decrease emissions of carbon dioxide, and by halting deforestation in tropical areas and promoting reforestation of temperate areas of the world, since trees act as a sink for CO2

GREENFIELD DEVELOPMENT A Factory erected on a previously undeveloped site, as contrasted with extending or converting an existing plant. Greenfield; development allows firms to avoid the congestion and pollution problems of the areas around many old sites. It also allows an old plant to continue in use while its successor is being built. A disadvantage of Greenfield development is that it may be necessary to invest in providing new sites with power, transport and other facilities already in place in an old site. Greenfield developments are also liable to costly delays through planning objections from prospective neighbors and environmentalists who prefer Greenfield sites to remain green fields.