Off The Grid: Eco-Friendly Industry

Abstract

Is looking at nature directly a major factor in determining a sustainable building? Some architects are concerned with how humankind can integrate itself with nature in a sustainable way, reducing energy, materials, and resources. Why integrate with nature when all of the architectural solutions lie directly within nature’s designs and processes. Nature’s organisms seem instilled from birth with a precise directive: knowing where to build, what materials to use and how those materials go together. If we are to learn how to build, we must go to the source. The idea is not to build with the environment, but to harvest ideas from nature and adapt them as an architectural model for buildings. Rules and guidelines can be established from lessons that are learned from nature. These ideas from nature can be applied to our own technological problems and begin growing architecture in new directions. Is there a path for architecture that respects regional differences and environmental health while embracing appropriate technologies that can respond to the methods and processes found in nature? The idea is to blend aesthetics and program with architecture, finding useful systems from natural forms and organisms and incorporating the attributes into design projects. Architects may begin to conceptualize a building in a different, more organically expressive form than anything ever built. This innovative type of architecture will reveal both poetic and structural information. By creating a hybrid of these elements: nature and architecture through the fusion of environment, technology, and program, we can more fully understand and appreciate the importance of both. Buildings and communities will be restorative, pedagogical and inspirational living buildings.