Exploration Architecture founder Michael Pawlyn on biomimicry | Design for Life | Dezeen

[Music] i'm michael paulin i'm an architect and i have a particular interest in biomimicry at exploration architecture we use biomimicry to rethink all sorts of building types and develop solutions that use resources much more efficiently biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature it involves looking at how things work in biology and then learning from that to design better solutions the bioware pavilion is a proposal for a performance venue the form is partly based on mathematical forms and certain seashells and we're planning to grow this in seawater using very thin steel to tell the material where to grow takes the minerals out of the seawater and produces a structure similar to reinforced concrete this uses an absolute minimum materials to grow into a whole building in biology you often find very complex structures that achieve amazing resource efficiency by putting the material exactly where it needs to be with computational design and 3d printing it's getting much easier to mimic that level of complexity and efficiency in 2014 we were asked to put on an exhibition at the architecture foundation we proposed a whole series of 3d printed tables that would display the projects it used algorithms to work out what the most efficient place for all those materials would be based on bone and tree growth patterns and what we ended up with was something that used one thousandth of the material of a solid object of that volume bird skulls are a great example of a complex and very efficient structure and we used computational design to produce a version of this we created this 3d printed model which is a an enlarged version of a bird skull which ultimately we want to turn into a pavilion structure we were able to model this in a way that was quite similar to the way it actually grows in biology and what you have is these domes of incredibly thin bony material connected together with these struts and ties overall it's incredibly lightweight and very structurally efficient what you can see often in in shells and leaves is very thin surfaces turned into strong structures simply by folding them or having curves that's something that we've done in the abalone house we're learning from the same principles to turn a thin surface into something that's very strong we're using tiles made out of atmospheric carbon and that's what we need to do more of we need to find ways to make buildings by taking carbon out of the atmosphere by collaborating across science and art and computational design it gives us the chance to get much closer to the way things work in biology and that gives us a real chance to reintegrate what we do into biological systems and end up with buildings and cities that are zero waste that use far less material emit no pollution and they would deliver net benefits we can get to a point where architecture is actually producing a positive impact

Channel: Dezeen

Views: 36,720

Rating: 4.9227896 out of 5

Keywords: Dassault Systèmes, Dezeen, Michael Pawlyn, Exploration Architecture, Biomimicry, 3D printing

Id: 3QGCU5XpOZk

Length: 3min 14sec (194 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020