Archinect - News

CHYBIK + KRISTOF debut greenhouse tribute to Gregor Mendel in Brno

2023-06-01T17:03:00-04:00

The Brno office of CHYBIK + KRISTOF (CHK) just completed a new scientific greenhouse project in its historic Czech Republic home city.

Mendel’s Greenhouse is an homage to the influential late-19th-century genetics biologist and takes its form from the namesake’s own drawings of the human hereditary system produced at St. Augustin Abbey, to which the then 22-year-old first came to reside in 1844.

Photography by Laurian Ghinițoiu. Courtesy of CHYBIK + KRISTOF.

Taking the resemblance of the site’s original greenhouse that served as a laboratory for Mendel until it was destroyed in the 1870s, the new glass and steel structure will serve as a permanent exhibition of his scientific legacy as it doubles as a new hub for community and social engagement for Brno’s population of nearly 400,000.

Photography by Laurian Ghinițoiu. Courtesy of CHYBIK + KRISTOF.

CHK empha...

A living breathing building: How biology and architecture will change construction and the built environment

2019-07-24T12:53:00-04:00

The institutions have been jointly awarded £8m from Research England’s Expanding Excellence in England fund to establish the world’s first research Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE). It will lead to a whole new concept of the way we design and construct our buildings.

Maybe buildings of the future don't need to be AI filled structures face mapping our every move. Perhaps they need to be self-sustainable and responsive structures infused with a bit of biology. Architecture author, lecturer, and researcher Dr. Martyn Dade-Robertson shares new discoveries diving into these possibilities. Along with his colleagues at Newcastle and Northumbria Universities Dade-Robertson comments on his excitement towards the project in a recent university press release. "This is an incredibly exciting opportunity to create a new field of research. By bringing together architects, engineers, and bio-scientists, working with industry and investing in state-of-the-art facilities, we are aiming to rethink the building industry."

With the hopes to address changes and better construction practices, the team aims to create a brand new system of "Living Buildings." This collaboration of bio-scientists, architects, and engineers will open new doors for experimental biological...

Research shows what slime mold can teach us about planning cities

2018-12-31T17:01:00-05:00

Researchers from Lanzhou University in China have shown that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum is able to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem, a combinatorial test with exponentially increasing complexity, in linear time. Using focused light stimulus as negative feedback to maintain the criteria of the task, the authors demonstrated that this model was able to reliably output a high-quality solution.

Through observing physarum polycephalum, nicknamed the "many-headed slime", researchers have used its natural network formation to help solve many spatial design problems. Slime mold has shown itself capable of recreating rail systems, solving mazes, and now, the Traveling Salesman Problem—a question important to operations research that asks: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city and returns to the origin city?"

Neri Oxman: Architecture's modern day Wonder Woman

2018-10-08T16:08:00-04:00

What makes Dr. Oxman, the scientist, so unusual, said Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, is her aesthetic sense. “She’s not afraid of formal elegance,” Ms. Antonelli said. “The reason why she is a gift to the field of architecture and design is that her science works, her aesthetics work, and her theory works.

Tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, Dr. Neri Oxman's larger than life approach to architecture and design has continuously turned heads. Her impact in the world of architecture has led her to various breakthroughs in understanding the relationship and possibility between nature and the built environment.

Water based digital fabrication ©Neri Oxman | Behance

Coining the term, material ecology, Dr. Oxman and her motley crew at MIT has turned MIT's Media Lab into a fantastically eccentric playground. Through digital fabrication, synthetic design, and computational design Dr. Oxman and her team have developed amazingly beautiful and technically provocative multifunctional structures you would find in a science fiction novel.

Water based digital fabrication ©Neri Oxman | Behance

According to Dr. Oxman, "we treat design more like a gardening practice." The use of organic materials like ground up shrimp shells and silkworms are the natural stars in h...

Bacterial cities and their building codes

2017-07-26T09:41:00-04:00

Those biophysical forces are like universal zoning rules for the biofilm cities: they govern how the inhabitants obtain food and building materials, how they can move and how they interact with one another. Just as urban planners use their knowledge of civil engineering principles and regulations to build better cities for people, microbiologists and bioengineers can use these rules to make objects more or less hospitable to the billions of cells that live in and around us.

Biofilms are, essentially, omnipresent clusters of bacteria that foul everything from sewer lines to our teeth—99.9 percent of the simple cells called prokaryotes default to living in those close quarters among millions of their compatriots. Extracelluar matrix, a sticky combination of proteins and sugars, effectively glues billions of bacteria to a surface of choice, giving biofilms their shapes and protecting the cells living at the center.

The size of the biofilm and the interaction of cells within it give the different cells the opportunity to specialize in a particular task, such as acquiring food, subverting predators or acting as a reservoir of genetic material from which to regrow the entire structure.

“We can watch these complex communities in what is essentially their natural habitat and study their structure or metabolism. There’s a lot we can learn when we can study biofilms in their whole freaky native state,” said Melissa Garren, a marine biologist at California State...

Learning from our "biological elders": take a look at this short documentary on "Biomimicry"

2016-03-24T13:20:00-04:00

The idea is that perhaps we should be looking at these mentors, at these biological elders. They have figured out how to create a sustainable world. So rather than inventing it from scratch, why don’t we take our cues from them?

Watch the full video here, "brought to you" by none other than Leo DiCaprio:

For more information on biomimicry, take a look at some past Archinect articles or visit the documentary website:

"Architecture Follows Nature" lecture focuses on biomimicry and collaborative research

2014-03-18T20:17:00-04:00

Last Monday evening at the Italian Cultural Institute in Los Angeles, architect Ilaria Mazzoleni and evolutionary biologist Shauna Price tag-teamed a lecture on their joint-work, Architecture Follows Nature, a collection of architectural proposals inspired by various animal skins. It’s a pleasure when architecture publicly acknowledges and celebrates its inspiration from other disciplines, and by sharing the stage Mazzoleni and Price showed their commitment to this cross-disciplinary research, beyond analogy and into the depths of the design process.

Of the twelve proposals detailed in the book, Mazzoleni and Price presented two -- one inspired by the insulating properties of a polar bear’s fur, the other referencing the iridescence of bird feathers. All of the projects were designed by students in Mazzoleni’s SCI-Arc studio (her practice, im studio, is also invested in biomimicry and sustainable design). Calling these projects “biomimetic” is problematic for Mazzoleni and Price, as ...

Mitchell Joachim featured in Dwell Magazine, the Now 99 issue

2012-04-26T09:02:00-04:00

Mitchell Joachim, founder of Terreform ONE, was featured in the May issue of Dwell Magazine for the Now 99- Today's Design Landscape: Ideas, People, Products & Plans. An interview with Diana Budds explores Joachim's designs for biologically based architecture as the future of housing. The published interview follows.