Denis Dollens

(Santa Fe Art Institute / EXODESIC)

Flower Power

INTRODUCTION Computational plant simulation, hybridized as digitally-generated architecture, is part of the process and goal I’m pursuing in order to design forms infused with botanical properties. My process involves a search for ways to envision and model architecture and design derived from nature that addresses generative structure and environmental remediation in the context of biomimetics, digital-visualization, sustainability, materials, and machine fabrication (Frontispiece & Fig. 1 & 2). Simply articulating this methodology is a step, not only toward bio-architecture, but also toward an architecture with lifelike attributes. Biomimetic processes are already frequently followed in biochemistry, biology, pharmaceuticals, and material sciences as part of the quest for properties found in living organisms that may be extrapolated from observation and scientific analysis, to duplicate them in industrial, medical, and commercial products. (Ball, 1999. Benyus, 1997. Vincient, 1990. Mattheck, 1998)

Yet Biomimetics is also an established part of some university engineering departments, where nature’s forms, balance, shapes, connections, and growth strategies are considered in the contexts of strength, flexibility, durability, and hardness. However, in most design and architecture schools where sustainability and aesthetics are central issues, biomimetics is only now emerging. Biomimetics is not a new concept. Articulated from idea-eye-hand-material production as theorized in Gottfried Semper’s writings on architecture’s craft origins, (Herrmann, 1984) biomimetics has been used for centuries. Semper viewed weaving, knotting, and pottery as ur-techniques learned from nature that make construction possible. Even earlier, the seeds of a biomimetic approach, in an intellectual context, may be detected rooting in pre-science thinkers such as Frances Bacon; for example, in his call for the empirical investigation of nature.

For biotechnology, biochemestry, genetics, and material science, biomimetics is newly invigorated today—witness the attempts of scientists to fabricate sea shell-like hardness for industrial materials or construct synthetic bacteria to synthesize methane as an alternative to oil-based fules. (Wade, 2007) Someday, our vehicles might have tanks of bacteria instead of gasoline, and our buildings may have vats of bacteria processing sewage and gray water. I think we are witnessing genetic/cultural evolution selecting new patterns and information from aspects of nature we have previously not considered that ultimately place design within genetic nature. (Wilson, 1999) And, if design is part of nature, we need to begin reconceptualizing design-nature as a practice, as well as to investigate its use in retrofitting old and constructing new buildings that function with capabilities for bioremediation as standard prodedures. By using the tools of technology and science and giving buildings and cities biological properties that clean and conserve the environment while at the same time reducing electrical and natural gas consumption, architecture may be reanimated as an environmental asset, rather than as a liability to nature.

DESIGN-BIOMIMETICS Today, biomimetics applies to almost any kind of design. Select a natural object or organism—a shell, bone, plant, flower, or leaf—and start examining it as a source for material, design, and structural properties. Then focus your observations and draw or model those thoughts/observations, regarding the investigation process as a generative method for gathering information relevant to your project. This procedure illustrated one step toward a visual biomimetics for design, art, architecture, and urban planning—a method and practice based on observation, investigation of nature, and extrapolation that retreives information different from that sought by science: information that supplements and enriches a design agenda. This approach brings into view a system for design thinking that includes possibilities for creating buildings and structures as we know them as well as for retrofitting historic structures. But, more interesting, this approach provides an outline for conceiving buildings and structures that are aesthetically, materially, biologically, and mechanically more advanced in terms of environmental dynamics—the terrain, wind, rain, sunshine, power, sewage, polution, allergins—in a context of sustainable technologies and bioremediation. Such a system may also stimulate designers to include thinking about emerging materials and material possibilities as part of their design process. And, if we institute biomimetic methods, looking to and from nature, learning from built and natural ecosystems, as well as learning from cellular, biochemical, and biomechanical processes, we open a world of potential collaboration among biologists, botanists, engineers, and architects that further aids the evolving perception of what a biological architecture could be now and in the future. Xfrog is one program I use to simulate structures from plant information.

The software is generally used to digitally “grow” lifelike trees, shrubs, and flowers for landscape architecture. It has the ability to produce forms based on botanic algorithms imparting to the digital, 3D design, some of the attributes of living organisms. But Xfrog’s design-growth parameters can also be manipulated into original types of structures based on the same organic algorithms it uses to mimic, say, an oak or an elm. Metaphorically such manipulation can result in species of digitally grown structures and designs. (Fig. 3) For example, branching in trees may be transformed—in a sense, computationally hybridized—to produce experimental forms with a botanic heritage. In (Fig. 4) you see a small grove of Xfrog trees that I digitally simulated. And to the right (Fig. 5), you see them transformed as a structural building frame—the trees were programmed with out-stretched, cylindrical-branches, configured into a rectangle like that of a multistory building frame.

The trusses and structural beams of this frame employ simulated tree trunks and branches that follow natural geometries formulated by the software’s modified L-systems. The tree-to-truss design process emerges as relying on natural geometries and processes, such as phyllotaxy, phototropism, and/or gravitropism. While this process is not a copy of nature, it numerically models from nature’s alogrithms, calculated from biological analysis of plants and trees, to simulate botanic forms. (Niklas, 1994) The digitally-grown and STL-modeled trusses have branches growing out of and back into their trunk (think of a bonsai, branch-to-trunk graft); this graftlike operation fuses trunk and branches into a self-reinforcing, three-dimensional brace.

The idea behind such design research is to blend aesthetics and program with biomimetic process, calculated through L-systems, looking first to natural forms and organisms, finding useful properties, and then incorporating those desirable attributes into a project’s design cycle. DESIGN AS LIVING IDEAS Conceivably, our traditions of design and design-ideas are genetic-cultural processes, mimetically transferred (by means of books, paintings, buildings, cities), inherited (social imprinting, traditions), and expressed through our genetic-cultural actions as we cope with the natural and built environment in a context of abstract space, mechanics, materials, and geometrical constructions.

We take ideas from the past and as we re-think them, they are hybridized into contemporary contexts; we neurologically grow them again, pollinating them with current trends and our own environmental perceptions—design ideas survive, mutate, seek expression, develop, vanish, and/or go dormant. Design is a component of human evolution. I think that the reintroduction and study of plant and animal morphology, as implanted with historic forms, design philosophy, and traditional and advanced materials could give us the procedural means to twist, redevelop, redeploy, and evolve old ideas more effectively into innovative, sustainable, growing variations of evolutionary bioDesign. Furthermore, culling historic forms and biological morphology as co-generators for living thoughts, ideas, and design solutions is a way of understanding design as extended phenotypes and, thus, as natural expressions of human nature within Nature’s nature. (Dawkins, 1982. Thompson, 1966) Looking to The Museum of Natural History in London (Fig. 6).

The design elements important to my thesis are the arching metal trusses. For its time, the museum was structurally advanced—large-span trusses, engineered using triangulation and built in steel, arched over the museum’s central hall. Ironically, underneath these metallic arches, we see similar principles illustrated in far more advanced, biological structures. The building houses some of the museum’s collection of dinosaur skeletons. Look at the structural variation along the dinosaur’s spine. (Fig. 7) Consider, for example, just the neck section. These fossilized vertebras remain from a once living cantilever (counterbalanced by the tail), a kind of biological architecture that had muscle and tendons and skin, all working in neurological, electrochemical harmony. And, not only did it span space, support weight loads, it simultaneously canted, flexed, and pivoted. Study the dinosaur’s complete bone system—this biomechanical and biomineral structure—and it will reveal both poetic and structural information.

Think of drawing, designing, growing, modelling, and revisualizaing architectural structure from this physiological example. In classes and seminars I try to speculate with students what biomimetic adaptations starting from a dinosaur’s neck could look like using today’s tools and materials. How could a biomimetic variation be situated in a building with large spaces requiring very long beams or sinuous cantilevers? Could there be any advantage to introducing movement into a new structure? With questions such as these in mind, we may begin to conceptualize a building in a different, more organically expressive form than anything ever built

Denis Dollens

(BioDigital Architecture, Master Program, ESARQ)

not available at this time.