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Student: Ana Filippone
Advisor: Scott Shall
Content Experts: Ralph Nelson , Sara Codarin
Humanity is not acting as a symbiotic part of earth’s ecology. Since the industrial age, humans have settled on a linear, wasteful cycle of using resources. These unsustainable practices have disrupted the earth’s natural order and caused imbalances within its ecosystems such as climate change, extreme weather events, and natural resource depletion which threaten the longevity of a healthy planet.
Architects have a responsibility to adapt their design thinking for the well being of the people and places affected by these imbalances. An effective way to realize this is to provide closed-loop, adaptive, and regenerative design responses that aid in reversing the damage humans have inflicted on the planet.
Fortunately architects have an invaluable precedent to better understand how to solve these functional problems: biology. The earth has had 3.8 billion years of evolution to create closed-loop, regenerative biological systems even within the harshest planetary conditions. The practice of taking a design challenge and then finding an ecosystem that has already solved the challenge and emulating its behaviors and function is called performative biomimicry. This thesis posits that through the implementation of performative biomimicry, architects can design adaptive and regenerative ecosystems within increasingly harsh environments.
To investigate this hypothesis, the thesis tests the role that performative biomimicry could play in aiding architectural design within the harsh African Sahel region, the location most threatened by desertification due to increasing global temperatures. Exploring the reversal of desertification towards the return of a lush, restorative ecosystem via biomimetic principles is a key outcome of the exploration.
Use Your Cell Phone as a Document Camera in Zoom
From Computer
Log in and start your Zoom session with participants
From Phone
To use your cell phone as a makeshift document camera
