Form Follows Function (Ryer & Maddie)

Form Follows Function: Biomimicry in Architecture

When humans replicate animal behaviors, in actions and construction they are participating in Biomimicry. The intent of these actions is not only to replicate the visual aesthetics of what animals create but also mimic the actions of these creations and hopefully reap the same benefits. The attraction to Biomimicry comes as both the members of our group are fascinated by the action of “making” and both of our portfolios reflect this, with emphasis on construction and the relationship of form to function. We came to understand that in the animal world, forum almost always follows function and in hindsight, this is rather obvious. Both our time in the biosemiotics class and observation of animal activity would show that most animals have no concern for the looks of their creations. Termites take no pride in the shape of their mounds and obtain no benefit from its physical appearance but rather its ability to hold a constant temperature by holding onto the heat of the sun or the cool of the night. In a similar fashion a family of beavers is not seeking to make a statement by building their dams or the consequential lakes that build behind them, their only hope is for the provision of housing and a place to keep food for the months when it would become unavailable.

The bowerbird however, is a much more vain creature, one that builds only for visual benefit; the male collects objects of various colors and textures and arranges them in a specific fashion in order to attract a female. For many of our design choices, humans are closer to the bowerbird. We choose colors based on what we find most attractive, and a majority of us will choose to live in a space that we find beautiful, even if it isn’t amazingly functional. For both humans and the bowerbird forum is most revered. Biomimicry however, introduces the mentality of other animals to our construction. How can we lessen the workload of our structures? How can we live more cleanly? Can we be more efficient in out day-to-day life? The answers to many of these questions have already been answered by the animals around us and biomimicry introduces these concepts to modern human construction.

This information could easily be presented in a standard lecture with a corresponding slideshow format, however our group is not one that is entirely comfortable directly in front of a group and, being that our work focus more on construction rather than conceptual ideas we felt that we could not accurately portray our information with some abstract style of performance. Being that it is an accessible yet still follows a unique fashion we supposed a puppet show style performance would be a way of conveying our information in a manner that was again, accessible but also comfortable. It also allowed us to present our information in a similar fashion to a lecture yet with a whimsical and interesting twist. Indeed this was also our main goal; we hoped to be able to create a fun presentation where we could confidently show off the information and what we had learned. We also wanted to show examples of biomimicry in our performance that may have been less obvious than what was expected was well as show the difference between strong and weak examples of biomimicry. 

This presentation focused more on the relation of animal construction to that of humans and if given more time there is plenty of room for subtopics such as a more in depth look at the biosemiotic relations of animal to their constructions. More visual aids could have been utilized as well to aid in the depiction of animals and their making. Although the characters themselves were strong in their construction and visually, our group is very new to video recording and editing. This is something neither of us have really worked with in the past, and the final work would be much stronger both with more time taken in the care of recording and if this had been lead by someone more competent in that field. Our script did a fine enough job at getting across the information we hopped to portray, however their were elements that were clunky and again we believe that with more time and maybe the addition of a group member who was more skilled a writing these wrinkles may have been ironed out.

In conclusion, we were pleased with the final outcome of our presentation, as with any there are areas that could be expanded and with a topic as broad as biomimicry there is infinite room for this expansion.  

FormFunction1 from Madeline Vaccaro on Vimeo.

 

Annotated Bibliography

Aguilar, Javier Senosiain. Bio-Architecture. Oxford: Architectural, 2003. Print.

Aguilar’s book breaks down bio-architecture into ways we can see it functioning in nature, and how space, structure, and shape can each be analyzed to help us understand its importance. This was an early research tool in which we found helped us begin to think about our topic more thoroughly.

Aldersey-Williams, Hugh. Zoomorphic: New Animal Architecture. London: Laurence King Pub. in Association with Harper Design International, 2003. Print.

Zoomorphis provided us with some initial points of reference into architecture that mimicks nature merely at a surface level. However, we did not utilized any information directly from this source.

Benyus, Janine. "Janine Benyus: Biomimicry's Surprising Lessons From Nature's Engineers." TED. TED Conferences, LLC, Feb. 2005. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_shares_nature_s_designs>.

Benyus explores biomimicry’s potentials to help us design a better and more ecologically friendly world in this TED Talk. This served as a nice way to frame other methods of applying concepts of biomimicry to the world in addition to architecture.

"Biomimetic Architecture." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomimetic_architecture>

This Wikipedia page served as a good and brief primer on Biomimetic Architecture and its history. It also served as a lead into other points of research to develop our topics of discussion such as architect Antoni Gaudi, the different types of biomimetic architecture, as well as other concrete architecture examples to research.

"Eastgate Centre, Harare." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastgate_Centre,_Harare>.

This Wikipedia page served to give us a primer on the Eastgate Centre in Zimbabwe. It allowed us to gain a general understanding of what the building is, as well as to provide a simplified and concise example of how the passive cooling system in the centre works.

"Fooled by Nature - Beaver Dams." YouTube, Sept. 2008. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na2HYq11yuM>.

This video about beaver dams provides a great insight and understanding into the topic of beaver dams. It was mainly utilized as a source for visuals when presenting our ideas about beaver dams.

"Funny Flying Machines.mp4." YouTube, Jan. 2011. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAfERVvGqco>.

This video brings brief information on early flying machines to its viewers as well as the amazing footage of the many attempted machines. We used the footage of some of the more bird-like machines in our presentation.

Hancocks, David. Animals and Architecture. New York: Praeger, 1971. Print.

Hancocks book goes into much detail about animals and their architect-like behaviors, and more so gets into animals’ relationships with that of humans. This was an early source in our research and we did not directly pull information from it, however it provides great context for situating and differentiating animal behavior with its own architecture versus that of humans.

"MTV CRIBS PRICIEST PADS." YouTube, Dec. 2012. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk1l4DoxBcg>.

Small sections were taken from this video of the television show MTV Cribs in order to illustrate our points when talking about the bowers made by bower birds.

NatGeo Wild. "World's Weirdest - Bowerbird Woos Female with Ring." YouTube, June 2012. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U89tw093s_Y>.

This video provided our presentation with footage of bowerbirds collecting items for and building their bowers. It does have a great amount of information concerning bowerbirds and their bowers.

"Renaissance Da Vinci Flying Machine." YouTube, Aug. 2011. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugVB9ih9boQ>.

We originally wanted to use this video for it’s footage of Leonardo Da Vinci’s drawings of flying machines, but we decided to instead look to it for information.

"The History of the Hoover Dam." YouTube, Nov. 2013. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl678len3aY>.

This Youtube video provides a comprehensive guide to the history of the Hoover Dam, from which we pulled some information as well as footage of the dam itself.

"Termite World - Life in the Undergrowth - BBC Attenborough." YouTube, Nov. 2008. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGaT0B__2DM>.

This BBC video narrated by David Attenborough proved to be useful in it’s discussion of the sizely termite mounds in Zimbabwe. It also provided our presentation with detailed footage of the termite mounds themselves.

Vierra, Stephanie. "Biomimicry: Designing to Model Nature." Biomimicry: Designing to Model Nature. National Institute of Building Sciences, n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

Vierra’s writing provided us with more concrete examples of biomimicry. It also goes into detail about different projects that use concepts of biomimicry in order to better the world. It gets pretty in-depth into the topic, but we used it as a way to begin to understand the concept of biomimicry better but decided not to use the more hyper-specifics that this article provides.

"Vogelkop Bowerbird, Hüttengärtner." YouTube, Oct. 2012. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08xZeU6Aksc>.

This video provided better footage of bowerbirds and more detailed images of the birds building their bowers and attracting a mate.