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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. — L'Officiel
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... View full entry
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. — The New York Times
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... View full entry
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. — Quartz
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... View full entry
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 researchHuman organ-mimicking... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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. — Al Jazeera
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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.
— theguardian.com
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. — Next Nature
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... View full entry
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.
— bustler.net
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. — green.blogs.nytimes.com
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... — CNN's - THE NEXT LIST
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... View full entry
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.” — Grist.org
