BIOPHILIA & BIOMIMICRY, THE FUTURE OF GREEN

How would you describe the meaning of sustainable design in the year 2050?

Ideas, designs, architecture, buildings and, therefore, cities are shifting back to nature in a much more literal way than ever before.

Sustainable Design is leveling up from designing buildings with environmentally conscious materials that require as least amount of energy to run as possible, to designing buildings that are not only net-zero energy but also produce energy back into the grid. 

Biomimicry, or “learning from and then emulating natural forms, processes, and ecosystems to create more sustainable designs”, according to J. Benyus, is the future of design. Nature, both in its smallest and largest forms, takes and gives back. By 2050, the idea is that buildings will do the same. Buildings will begin to emulate nature in that they will be composed of materials and designed in ways that start giving back to the environment. The bi-products resulted from the creation or lifetime of buildings will no longer hurt the environment, they will sustain the environment.

Throughout the past hundred years, Architects have somewhat separated Nature from Technology and named Technology as the driver of design. J. Benyus states that “the deep, deep separation between those two ideas in our culture was why biomimicry was squirming to be born.” The issue is we have been so enamored with Technology in innovating sustainable design, that we have forgotten how to return to Nature for answers that Technology failed to answer. The idea is, as the world’s condition begs for an evolution of our sustainability approach to design, we need a new mentor to learn from and usher in this new era. According to J. Benyus, our mentor is Nature.

“Yearning for something that works for instead of against life, professional innovators are heading outside to see how other species have managed to survive for 3.85 billion years. Their models are organisms that manufacture without ‘heat, beat, and treat,’ and ecosystems that run on sunlight and feedback, creating opportunities rather than waste. The resulting designs are functional, sustainable, and not surprisingly, beautiful as well. Beauty is a large part of why biomimicry resonates. Our search for mentors brings us back into contact with the living world, a place we were tuned to appreciate. Having spent 99.9% of our planetary tenure woven deep into the wild, we humans naturally admire the weaverbird’s nest, the conch’s shell, the scales of a shimmering trout. In fact, there are few things more beautiful to the human soul than good design.”

In short, sustainable design in 2050 will foster the ideas of biomimicry in order to emulate nature in its forms, process, and ecosystems. 

What are going to be the main drivers for sustainability at that point in time, particularly for the city of Boston?

There are over 100M homeless people around the world today, based on the TED Talk provided by Michael Green in 2013. And there is no sustainable solution to resolve this issue. To make matters worse, over the next 20 years the world’s population will increase by 3 billion people (40% growth). And these people will need homes, too. Two of the largest problems we face nowadays is we need to solve the housing crisis and we need to protect against climate change. The dilemma is more housing is detrimental to our environment, promoting climate change. 

According to M. Green, the main factor driving this dilemma are the building materials conventionally used for construction. Steel and concrete have very high levels of greenhouse gas emissions during their creation. Because of their frequent use in buildings (due to durability, versatility, cost, etc) 47% of greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings. A. Ewing reminds us that concrete wasn’t always so impactful to the environment. She states that “while making Portland cement requires kilns that fire at 1,450 C, the Romans knew how to make cement without applied heat. They packed volcanic rock and lime in forms, and then submerged the forms in seawater, where the material would heat up and harden. The resulting cement is stronger and lasts longer than conventional concrete.” Demand and cost lead us to find quicker and more streamlined methods of creating concrete, shying away from the natural processes, to the detriment of our environment. 

M. Green argues that the main driver for sustainability in the future will be to use wood as the main material for construction in order to both solve the housing crisis and prevent further harm to our climate. Wood is the only construction materials grown by the power of the sun. It is also the only product that both does not emit CO2 during its creation and stores CO2 within itself for its lifetime. 1 Cubic meter of wood stores one ton of CO2. Based on M. Green’s calculations, a 20 story building made out of concrete (conventional method…not Roman) emits about 1,215 tons of CO2. The same building, but made of wood, stores 3,150 tons of CO2 (that would have otherwise been emitted into the environment if the wood had naturally rotted in the forests). The net CO2 “saved” is 4,360 tons (or 900 cars removed from the road in one year) if the building is made of wood and not concrete. M. Green argues that as technology/architecture and nature/biology merge back into one idea, the city skylines in the future, including Boston, will consist of wooden skyscrapers. His firm is already refining new construction methods of using wood beyond our typical 2X4 stud framing mentality. He calls them Mass Timber Panels, which are structural, operate favorably in fire and can be harvested in sustainable methods in order to prevent harmful deforestation. 

M. Green concludes by stating that “Earth grows our food…and Earth should grow our homes too."                                 

                                           

Responses to the following questions are supported by the following Publication:

A Biomimicry Primer, Janine M. Benyus, 2013

Building Design + Performance, Allison Ewing, ECO Building Pulse, 2013

Michael Green TED Talk, 2013

Mitchell Joachim TED Talk, 2010