The seminar focuses on the investigation, abstraction and transfer of biological strategies into technical applications. Students will work in interdisciplinary teams to investigate biological role models within a bottom up process and will be searching for solution strategies towards specific aspects by exploring biological role models within a top down process. Computational simulation and analysis tools are used to find model representations for biologic processes and investigate functional principles.
Evolutionary processes in nature generated manifold solutions in respond to environmental and performative demands, where various functional and form generative aspects have to be integrated in a coherent system. While a number of those aspects can be easily transferred to architectural aspects, natural organisms are working radically different from today’s construction and planning practice. While nature evolved highly energy and material efficient solutions, based on geometrical and material differentiation, today’s construction industry and design processes are mostly based on the standardization of elements and the addition of mono functional subsystems.
Recent developments of computational design and digital fabrication processes have initiated a fundamental paradigm shift from industrial production of standardized elements towards an integrated design processes. This development opens up the possibilities to create architectural systems which are characterized by multifunctional geometrically differentiated structures, which can match the capacity of nature’s performative morphologies, and thereby enables us to transfer functional principles of natural organisms into architectural applications.
John W.C. Dunlop and Peter Fratzl. “Biological Composites,” Annual Review of Materials Research 40(1) (2010): 1.
Helge Otto Fabritius, C. Sachs, Dierk Raabe, Svetoslav Nikolov, Martin Friak, J. Neugebauer. „Chitin in the exoskeletons of arthropoda: From ancient design to novel materials science.” In Chitin, ed. Neal S. Gupta. (Berlin: Springer, 2011), 35.
Petra Gruber, Biomimetics in Architecture, (Wien, Springer, 2010).
Jan Knippers and Thomas Speck, 2012. “Design and construction principles in nature and architecture,” Bioinspiration & Biomimetics 7(1) (2012).