 I've been doing some reading on Greenbuild.
On November 19th, the Greenbuild 2008 conference kicked off in Boston, Massachusetts. Approximately 30,000 people from all around the world attended the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) event, which featured four days of discussions, seminars, tours, 800 industry vendors and tons of networking opportunities.
The theme which quickly became clear amongst all the attendees and vendors was the idea of "living buildings." E.O.Wilson and Janine Benyus addressed this by stating if we design buildings to act as living organisms, they said, we can make a huge difference for our future. The advice they gave to the architects and designers in the room, was to look to nature for advice and use biomimcry in their designs.
Biomimicry is a new discipline that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.
Fascinating!
The industry visionaries unveiled two new online resources that will help inspire designers to draw ideas from nature: The Encyclopedia of Life is an ambitious database project aggregating all published information about all the species known to this planet, from the thriving to the extinct. Asknature.org offers a more guided path for learning from nature. As their site states, you will find a starter culture of ideas—biological blueprints and strategies, bio-inspired products and design sketches, and biomimics you can talk to and collaborate with.
Sounds like we're going to be seeing more and more building mimicing nature in the future!Labels: Biomimicry, greenbuild, nature |
