The main drivers behind this research were the fashionable concept of biomimetic architecture or bio-inspired building design and the ongoing debates centring on its dual philosophical promises of promoting sustainability and aiding innovation.
Given the world’s buildings are huge consumers of energy, and bearing in mind the apparent potential of biomimicry to offer solutions for solving issues in human ways of living, this study sought to investigate if a systematic process could be set up to assist architects in connecting the thermal challenges in a building to solutions new to architecture used by living organisms to endure or respond to unfavourable environmental conditions.
Since the term ‘biomimicry in architecture’ was coined, a number of roadmaps have been developed to bridge the gap between biology and architecture in the context of designing energy-efficient buildings.
These produced by recent research were neither comprehensive, nor evaluated by experts in biology, and even more significantly there was no exploration of the architectural side of the framework to explain the process architects could take to identify the sources of high energy uses in either an existing building or a building at the concept design phase.
As a result, this research aimed to investigate the possibility of developing a thermo-bio-architectural framework. This framework would be set up in such a manner that users could find innovative thermoregulatory bio-inspired principles as they worked through a top-down design process in which the thermal challenges were identified beforehand. This became the ThBA.
Architectural Science Review Newsletter, Third quarter 2019, Volume 5 No 3: https://anzasca.net/newsletters/2019/2019-3.pdf