While several biological thermal adaptation strategies are currently translated to and employed in sustainable building design, they, represent at best a simple translation of the intricate mechanisms of thermal adaptation in nature.
A new generation of buildings could be fully-automated, smart buildings that exactly imitate what a living organism does. This requires the architecturally-equivalent thermoregulation solution to function in exactly in the same way as biological strategies do, including almost every aspect of a living being: locomotion, reproduction, growth and development, and respiration, with a complex hierarchical organisation of components
Biologist confirmed the ThBA is effective in bridging biology and architecture based on the existing thermal challenges in buildings, and is comprehensive in terms of generalising biological thermal adaptation strategies.
Biomimicry has attracted the attention of scholars and architects because of its potential for contributing to the design of energy efficient buildings. Given the importance of energy efficient buildings in reducing global building energy consumption, the aim of this research was to investigate the practical usefulness of a framework developed for designing bio-inspired energy efficient office buildings.
The ThBA was developed by studying biology to find how thermal regulation strategies used by living organisms can be classified and generalised. The proposed ThBA was confirmed and evaluated before it was used for the rest of the research.
Testing the ThBA for two extreme climates in New Zealand, highlighted the fact that the simple translation of the majority of biological thermal adaptation principles are being used by architects, although for some, the architectural equivalents did not function in exactly in the same way as biological thermoregulation strategies.
SlowLoris can be web-based and is totally independent of all current energy data visualisation software and complementary energy plugins. It uses the Grasshopper interface and its components to construct graphs. It is mainly targeted at optimising the visual representation of energy results and does not need highly skilled experts to be used effectively.
In the next Ecology & Evolution Seminar Series, Negin Imani will be talking about her PhD research on bio-inspired energy efficient building design.
Movement and functionality in Calatrava’s works are more pronounced than that of Gaudi due to the different time periods and technological progress as well as the influence of constructivist architects. Calatrava was influenced by Gaudi in architecture. With the tone of the day and utilisation of structure and technology, Calatrava goes beyond his culture and traditions in the modern context.
