Archinect - News

The future of couture is a blend of fashion, technology, and architecture

2018-12-28T14:27:00-05:00

Technology and innovation are an important part of this, but nature is my source of inspiration. That can not be otherwise, because I work for the body. Many people see nature and technology as two very different things, but I see technology as a simplified version of biological processes.

Haute couture made its debut in 1858 with Charles Frederick Worth's iconic House of Worth. Since then fashion's historical timeline has influenced architects and designers in numerous ways. Fast forward to 2018, this relationship with architects has not faded. Zaha Hadid and Neri Oxman, for example, have used fashion as another element to display methods of architectural practice. With the evolution of the 3D printer, creating mesmerizing shapes and forms has allowed for the possibilities of fashion to transform into something more than just a pretty dress.

Wanderers: Biologically-augmented 3D printed wearables ©Neri Oxman | Behance & Shoes by Zaha Hadid for United Nude Image © Zaha Hadid Architects

Acclaimed Dutch designer, Iris Van Herpen, blends fashion, science, and technology to create rhythmically stunning works. High fashion and the art of 3D fabrication is becoming more and more prevalent on the runway, and Van Herpen's Syntopia is no exception. In collaboration with Studio D...

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...

What ants can teach us about the Eiffel Tower

2017-07-18T17:36:00-04:00

Scientists at Georgia Tech were trying to figure out how ants built themselves into towers to escape confinement or danger. They put a small pole in the middle of a dishful of ants and filmed what happened. The ants, they found, climb upwards, on top of each other, until they find an empty spot. Then they stop. The next one does the same, and so on.

Alexander McQueen, rebel of the fashion world renowned for his wildly imaginative designs, always said that there is no better designer than nature. Through billions of years of evolution, life's products, so to speak, have been extensively prototyped, market tested, upgraded and refined. So, it is no wonder then why creative minds increasingly turn to nature to look for innovative design solutions.

Often referred to as biomimicry, the discipline has had a growing presence in the field of architectural design. With a recent study from Georgia Institute of Technology on how fire ants form towers, the architectural world has a new potential take away from nature. Done simply through trial-and-error, the fire ants create bell shaped structures by climbing on top of each other until they find an empty spot, at which point they stop. Each ant supports only three others above them, creating a structure where each ant bears the same load and the results look a lot like the famed Eiffel To...

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:

Human organ-mimicking microchip wins Designs of the Year Award 2015

2015-06-23T19:18:00-04:00

A microdevice called Human Organs-on-Chips is engineered with the astounding ability to mimic the complex structures, functions, and mechanical motions of whole human organs. Fabricated by scientists Donald Ingber and Dan Dongeun Huh at Harvard University's Wyss Institute, Human Organs-on-Chips was announced today as the 2015 Designs of the Year Award winner in the Design Museum's popular international competition.

The annual contest shows off an entertaining categorized mix of thoughtful designs whose creators range from global-brand giants to emerging entrepreneurs. Needless to say, competition is tough year after year. In 2014, Zaha Hadid's Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, Azerbaijan snatched the winning title.

The 2015 edition started out with 76 nominated Designs-of-the-Year hopefuls across six categories: Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Graphic, Product and Transport. (The Furniture category in previous editions appears to have been omitted.) Last month, the jury then selected the ...

Winners of the Hypernatural book giveaway

2015-06-20T17:36:00-04:00

In Archinect's latest book giveaway, readers had the chance to win a copy of "Hypernatural: Architecture's New Relationship with Nature" authored by Blaine Brownell and Marc Swackhamer from the University of Minnesota. Published by Princeton Architectural Press, Hypernatural highlights 42 case-study projects that demonstrate a fresh array of possible architectural applications in the evolving connection between the built and natural environments.

The five winners are:

Martin L. - Toronto, Canada
Anthony S. - California
Matt W. - Florida
Lisa S. - California
Chrysi K. - New York

Congrats! Thanks to all who participated.

Win a copy of "Hypernatural: Architecture's New Relationship with Nature"

2015-06-05T15:31:00-04:00

The growing presence of biomimicry in architectural design takes the spotlight in Hypernatural: Architecture's New Relationship with Nature, authored by architecture and materials academic experts Blaine Brownell and Marc Swackhamer from the University of Minnesota. Published by Princeton Architectural Press, Hypernatural highlights 42 case-study projects that demonstrate a fresh array of possible applications in the evolving relationship between the built environment and Mother Nature.

Sounds interesting? Archinect is giving away five copies of Hypernatural to our readers!

TO ENTER THE GIVEAWAY: Fill out this survey by the deadline on Wednesday, June 17. Five winners will be chosen. Good luck!

More book details below:

(Top) Echoviren; (Bottom): The Cloud | Photos courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press.

Hypernatural features a foreword by Michael Weinstock, an Introduction to the book, and an international collection of 42 case-studies. A few of the projects include the botanical Ech...

Hummingbird Drones and other Bio-inspired Robotics

2014-10-23T13:38:00-04:00

Birds have remarkable flight capabilities...They make it look effortless, but engineering a drone to do the same is anything but. It’s a major engineering feat to harness the evolutionary talents of a bird and translate them into a robot that can deliver packages to your doorstep. By understanding how birds have mastered the ability to swoop and dive, [Stanford professor David] Lentink and his team [of mechanical engineers] hope to inform microdrone design.

Similar to biomimicry (and its correspondent field of architectural thinking), bio-inspired design takes it cues from biological systems, although it entails simplification, enhancement and non-mimetic adaptation of observed phenomena rather than replication. Bio-inspired robotics, specifically, is a rather new field, although its origins can be traced back to the earliest engineering projects. For example, Leonardo Da Vinci famously studied birds, in particular kites, when he drew out plans for wings that could enable human flight.

The US military is a major player in the field of bio-inspired robotics. In 2011, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) released images of its own hummingbird-inspired drones, pictured above. Manufactured by AeroVironment the Nano Air Vehicle is capable of flying along three axes of motion as well as hovering in mid-air. Equipped with a small camera, the 19 gram drone is small enough to surveil without attracting much attention.

DARPA stud...

"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 ...

Will the buildings of the future be grown underwater?

2014-02-17T14:40:00-05:00

In a new exhibition, Michael Pawlyn lays out his vision for architecture inspired by the natural world – including biorock buildings grown entirely underwater and whole office blocks being lit by learning from the blind sea star. [...] “All my work is driven by a frustration with the word ‘sustainable’,” he says. “It suggests something that is just about good enough, but we need to be looking at truly restorative solutions.

Dreaming of an architecture that could produce buildings with organs and physiologies

2013-09-26T13:08:00-04:00

Very immediately I’m working on the Persephone Project which is concerned with the design and implementation of a giant natural computer that will form the ‘living’ interior to a world-ship. It is going to be officially launched at the Starship Congress, in Dallas, from august the 15 of this year. I will also talk about Persephone further at Future Fest in the UK which runs over the weekend 28th to the 29th September.

Earlier this summer Alessia Andreotti spoke with Dr. Rachel Armstrong about living buildings, Venice’s foundations, millennial nature and how to improve our future. The two also discussed Dr. Armstrong's involvement in the Persephone Project, which is "charged with the design and implementation of a giant natural computer that will form the ‘living’ interior to the Icarus Interstellar worldship, which constitutes a kind of ‘space’ Nature".

As a bonus, over at Centauri Dreams, Paul Gilster shared Rachel Armstrong’s August 15th presentation at Starship Congress, with his readers.

h/t Bruce Sterling

B+U’s Animated Apertures to be featured at the ArchiLab 2013 exhibition

2013-08-30T14:15:00-04:00

Baumgartner+Uriu's "Animated Apertures", a housing tower in Lima, Peru, will be featured at the ArchiLab 2013 exhibition at the FRAC (Les Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain) in Orleans, France starting in September. [...] Staying true to nature as possible, Herwig Baumgartner and Scott Uriu designed Animated Apertures to be "an interactive and intelligent building organism" as opposed to digitalized congruity.

Will Biomimcry Offer a Way Forward, Post-Sandy?

2013-01-04T18:25:00-05:00

As neighborhoods devastated by Hurricane Sandy begin drafting plans for reconstruction, some progressive architects and urban planners have been pointing out that the emerging science of biomimicry offers a way forward. The notion is that the next generation of waterfront designs could draw inspiration from the intricate ways that plants and animals have adapted to their situations over hundreds of millions of years.

Five tenets of a new kind of architecture

2012-12-16T20:56:00-05:00

So when people look at you know, at the ability to 3D print using a robotic arm, they're very, very curious about the possibility of in the future, printing full scale houses, so I think the media lab and specifically in the Media Matter Group, we don't focus only on efficiency translations. For that, I would open a practice in the commercial world, but that's not the function of this lab...

Neri Oxman founder of the Mediated Matter group at MIT’s Media Lab was recently profiled in a 30-minute segment and interviewed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. CNN also published a short essay in which Ms. Oxman begins to define a design credo suitable for the contemporary context, wherein the World-as-Machine is replaced by the World-as- Organism. The five components include; Growth over Assembly, Integration over Segregation, Heterogeneity over Homogeneity, Difference over Repetition and Material is the New Software.

As Bruce Sterling noted elsewhere "Looks like Prof Neri’s working up a manifesto there."

Super-freaky train station design looks like a spider laying eggs

2012-08-23T13:31:00-04:00

I went to Vienna earlier this year, and it’s extremely charming and deeply concerned with coffee and cake, both of which I appreciate. But I confess that as I wandered the streets, looking up at graceful churches and palaces, I often thought “what a shame it is that none of these buildings look like a nightmare structure of bare twigs and spider egg sacs.”

Biomimicry in architecture and the start of the Ecological Age

2012-02-22T14:11:03-05:00

Some aspects of biomimicry have been played around with for a long time for example mimicking the structure of termite mounds. There have been a lot of architects who have toyed with biomimicry, but have been quite dependent on seductive imagery such as spiders' webs, but often the designs haven't been seen through in a particularly thorough way. Sometimes the examples from nature are just used as a departure point for developing original and whacky forms.