Biologists and Designers Team Up to Do It Nature’s Way

Sustainable development is moving to a new level where buildings are integral to nature, supporting nature’s work rather than interfering with life-sustaining ecosystems. HOK, the world’s largest architecture-engineering firm, has teamed up with the Biomimicry Guild to bring about this innovative shift with the introduction of biomimicry to the build environment.

Biomimicry enables architects and engineers to design buildings and other structures that perform like nature, notes Mary Ann Lazarus, director of Sustainable Design for HOK.

“A building designed with biomimicry principles might or might not look like a tree, but different aspects will function like a tree,” explains Janine Benyus, a biologist, cofounder of the Biomimicry Guild and author of Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.

In fact, under this new order of sustainability, buildings, outdoor art and other manmade structures would function like trees, meadows, flora and fauna, capturing, cleaning and storing rainwater; converting sunlight to energy and carbon dioxide to oxygen; protecting soil from erosion; disseminating seedlings; and eliminating waste.

The Biomimicry Guild is a Montana-based consulting firm that helps entrepreneurs create bio-inspired design adaptations that emulate nature’s best ideas.

“We look at nature’s R&D lab, which has been around for 3.8 billion years, and use those incredible strategies and concepts to make better products in the business world,” Benyus explains.

Although there are examples of buildings with biomimcry features worldwide, the Guild is the first organization to bring the concept full circle, tapping nature’s vast storehouse of knowledge on how things work to improve products and affect environmental sustainability.

The Guild’s role in the biomimicry building model involves three processes:

1. Scoping to develop an understanding of the challenges and set design goals. “Taking our cue from native ecosystems, we begin by asking questions like, how many tons of CO2 is sequestered by the native ecosystem per year, how many gallons of water are stored per storm, how many gallons are filtered per month and so forth,” says Dayna Baumeister, biologist and Guild co-founder.

“If we wanted to build a biomimicry building in New Orleans, we’d first go there and ask the question: What has lived here for centuries and survived the hurricanes?” explains Benyus. “On St. Charles Street, there are 400 live oaks, and only four died as a result of Katrina,” she notes. “So we’d examine those oaks, look at their root structure, settlement patterns and how they build in ways to protect themselves from prevailing winds and frost — what can we learn about their seasonality and response to fire or floods?”

2. Creating is the inspirational work when, after observing how nature deals with challenges to sustaining life under existing conditions, ideas and strategies adaptations that mimic nature’s solutions are developed. “We come up with a list of building best practices for a specific region that fits the weather, the soil, the storms,” Benyus says. “This helps to create a building that’s not imposed on the environment, but is brought into line with it.”

In developing strategies/ideas, Baumeister says the biologists take a genius-of-nature approach and apply Life’s Principles:

Life Adapts and Evolves: It becomes locally attuned and responsive, resilient and integrates processes.

Life Creates Conditions Conducive to Life: It optimizes rather than maximizes, leverages interdependence and involves benign manufacturing.

3. Evaluating is the final phase. The team determines how well the creation mimics natural solutions — how well the strategies worked — by comparing the results against natural ecosystems. The goal is to match or improve on nature’s work.

• 1
• 2
• 3
• next page »