BIOMIMETICS AND NATURAL DISASTERS

Hylozoic Ground, Philip Beesley, Rob Gorbet, Rachel Armstrong

A major natural disaster occurs, on average, 10 times a year, with minor disasters striking as frequently as once per week. These include floods, tidal waves, tornadoes, ice storms, fires, landslides, hurricanes, and earthquakes. Major global cities, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Mumbai, to mention only few of them, have suffered from numerous disasters and an enormous number of people have died.

Scientists are able to predict the time needed from the starting point of a disastrous event until it reaches the affected areas, but still they are not able to predict when a disaster will happen. For example for the hurricane Sandy the meteorologists could measure the speed of the wind and thus could predict the amount of time needed for the hurricane to reach the northeast areas of United States. In consequence, people living in the coastal areas built barriers in order to protect their properties. However, there still were a large number of constructions that had been destroyed.

Nowadays, architects try to take into consideration these unpredictable events in their design, especially when conceptualizing and designing public spaces in coastal areas. For example, they have started designing different programs in different height levels so the lower could be sacrifice in case of flood emergency and function as barriers or large tanks for flooding water.

There are architects and researchers on environmental disasters who investigate multiples ways that a construction could react during a disaster. These projects are paradigms from biomimetic architecture. For example the researcher Rachel Armstrong in the University of Greenwich is doing a research in protocell architecture. She believes that the problem is that buildings during a disaster react as machines so they don’t have the flexibility of a physical organism. Moreover, she considers that the traditional architecture has separated nature from human activities. In her research ‘’Architecture That Repairs Itself’’ she is dealing with the problem of sickness of the constructions in Venice. She has developed protocells that could create an artificial shell-like structure. Architecture nowadays developed the biomimetic principles one step further by creating living architecture. Other examples of this is the self-healing concrete, in which researchers plug bacteria or the Silk pavilion from MIT media lab, in which they used 6,500 live silkworms to form the pavilion.

As Rachel Armstrong argued, our future cities will be designed more like gardens than machines. This is an idea similar to Frank Lloyd Wright’s argument about organic architecture: “may go by the way of the machine to teach his own people not foolishly to rebuild but to build the new beyond the old; to build a nation that is itself more like one great organic life all together; to so now how to go forward into organic life universal…” Wright contemplates that architecture should live with nature as a whole. Could we perhaps visualize Wright’s dream in the near future? Would ever large cities be constructed of living organisms? Are they going to sense and respond in the disasters? For sure the cities of the future will be based on time not on space.  For sure, major cities will be constructed so as to react on disasters, not just receive them catastrophically.