The article "It's Alive! How Closely Can a Building Emulate Nature?" from the Boston Globe presents some interesting ideas that help expand upon current thinking about sustainability and what it means for cities.
The author raises "the prospect of a future where the built environment works in a radically different way - not as a foil for nature, but as seamlessly integrated with it as possible." With biomimicry or biomimetic design there is the potential for "buildings as closed-loop ecosystems that, like a forest or savanna, draw their energy from the elements and produce no net waste - and perhaps even improve the surrounding environment."
One of the leaders of biomimicry mentioned in the above article, Janine Beynus, spoke at UC Berkeley last spring as part of the College of Environmental Design's 50th anniversary. I attended her lecture and at one point she showed an image of several tall skyscrapers from the street level looking up and posed the question, “what if this,” referring to the buildings, “performed like this?” and then transitioned to a photograph of towering redwood trees taken from the same point of view. (For more information about her work, link to Ask Nature on the right side of this page.)
With the built environment working like the natural environment it replaces, issues of time and scale become less important. It seems that if Los Angeles can design buildings that replicate the natural functions of the environment they occupy, then the closer we are to constructing truly sustainable buildings that rely less on water from the Sacramento Delta or electricity from remote power plants.
Here is a lecture by Janine Beynus on "Biomimicry in Action" from Ted.com:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/janine_benyus_biomimicry_in_action.html
The opportunities for creating a built environment that functions like the natural environment is a real leap from current thinking about "green" buildings that simply meet a minimum threshold of points.