Digital Architectural Design Inspired by and Created with Nature

Abstract

Since the industrial revolution, the human world has been dominated by eco-systemically unintegrated and non-sustainable manufacturing and mass production leading to natural disasters and extinctions. However, a new perspective is now emerging: an architectural design that does not impose itself on nature but is born, inspired, and integrated with it. Over millions of years of evolution, high-performance strategies and materials have been developed in nature, providing valuable sources of inspiration. This contribution aims to provide a new vision in which the “learning from nature” approach combined with bio-based/biohybrid materials and with a coherent use of computational design and fabrication can be configured as a future direction of human design that can imitate and integrate nature through multiple dimensions. A research project is proposed: BioArch 3.8 in which bio-inspired/bio-based design and robotic fabrication are used to realize adaptive shelters for emergency contexts.