Having just finished reading Michael Palwyn’s Biomimicry in Architecture as background reading  for upcoming book, Healing the Future, I am looking forward to the Green Vision session on Biomimicry and Biophilia with Richard James MacCowan (Director and Co-Founder,Biomimicry UK ), Yaniv Peer (Associate – Exploration) along with others TBC.  (This GreenVision event is key for anyone in the built environment with an interest in sustainability and looking to improve knowledge and awareness of biomimicry and biophilic developments, Registration and more detail here)

Richard James MacCowan, Re-thinking Nature The world that we live in faces enormous challenges such as climate change, food security, biosphere integrity and freshwater use. Nature can play a strong role to tackle some of the most pressing challenges of our time. Solutions are at our fingertips, they are cost effective and we know how to implement them. Richard’s talk will focus on developments, research, case studies and future opportunities that this vital strand of sustainability can offer our industry.

Yaniv Peer (Associate – Exploration): Radical Nature  At a time when architecture and society urgently need to reconsider their relationship to the natural world there are few more exciting and innovative ways to find solutions to our current and future challenges than the discipline known as Biomimicry. This field uses nature as a mentor, learning from its ingenious adaptations that have undergone 3.8 billion years of research and development to produce exceptionally well evolved solutions. This talk will explore three projects of the London based Exploration Architecture Ltd and how it is that they use biomimicry in their work to offer new solutions to some of the biggest challenges we face today. 

And it’s not just material innovation that can benefit here. We can learn from nature for construction process and improvement. Indeed nature works with small and continuous feedback loops, always learning, adopting and evolving to its changing environment. Through learning and applying such feedback loops to design, to construction and to management of facilities we will be able to achieve far better sustainable processes, buildings and facilities.

I was struck by a review comment from Peter Head @PeterHeadCBE (Chair, Global Consulting Planning at Arup) on the cover of Michael Palwyn’s book:

“Between now and 2050 I think Biomimicry is going to be one of the main tools that will facilitate the transition from the industrial age to the ecological age” 

Agree!