Biosphere 2 | Life at HOK

Posts Tagged ‘biosphere 2’

10 November 2008 | Posted inBiomimicry, Sustainable Design

Learning to Design for Life

HOK has announced an alliance with the Biomimicry Guild that is intended to help integrate nature’s innovations into the firm’s planning and design solutions. To jumpstart the process, 21 HOK designers from all over the world recently convened at Biosphere 2 outside Tucson, Arizona, for a weekend immersion study in biomimicry. The Biomimicry Guild’s Dayna Baumeister and Taryn Mead led the session, which was designed to introduce the concept of bringing nature’s wisdom into every phase of the design process.

One common misperception for people being introduced to biomimicry is that designers will simply use nature as inspiration to shape a product’s form. The goal for this weekend was to provide hands-on experience using life’s principles to inform …

Biomimicry Workshop at Biosphere 2

My weekend Biomimicry Workshop at the Biosphere 2 in Arizona.

This was the view from our dinner table the first night at the workshop, with a prickly pear margarita in hand, my first night in Arizona.

As a closet biologist (attribute given to me by the Biomimicry Guild), I find nature incredibly fascinating. Before commencing my studies at the UPR’s school of architecture, I studied general sciences with an emphasis in genetics, physics, and geology. So you can just imagine how crazy my first year projects were. I used formulas like v=d/t to build a “habitable space” that when moved would “gain” time and thus travel through the space/time continuum. I used the second law of …