From Nature to Architecture for Low Tech Solutions: Biomimetic Principles for Climate-Adaptive Building Envelope

Abstract

Building envelopes represent the interface between indoor and outdoor environmental factors. In recent years, attention to climate adaptive building envelopes has increased. However, some types of adaptive envelopes don’t always offer low-tech solutions, but require energy for their activation and high operating and maintenance costs. Nature has always proposed a large database of adaptation strategies that are often complex, multi-functional, and responsive. Transferring the functional principles of natural organisms and their associated adaptive modalities to technologies is the challenge of the biomimetic discipline (from Greek bios, life, and mimesis, imitation) applied to the field of architecture. In this article, various examples of biomimetic architecture that illustrate the relationships between biology, architecture, and technology, were considered. Various analyses of the operating principles of natural organisms are carried out, particularly with regard to self-adapting materials, in order to transfer them to the building envelope, and to propose technological solutions capable of passively adapting to external climatic conditions. Among all natural organisms, plants are prefereble to animals because, like buildings, they remain stationary in a specific location. Despite this, plants have developed different adaptation mechanisms to survive in certain environments. Buildings with biomimetic adaptive envelopes, characterized by passive and low-tech solutions inspired by plants, help limit energy consumption, and improve not only the indoor microclimate but also the outdoor environment. In line with the ecological transition, this work highlights the importance of biomimetic as a strategy to orient the new paradigms of built space design towards innovative and sustainable models of low-tech solutions.