California Center for Sustainable Energy

Learning from and emulating ecosystem engineering

By creating homes, businesses, communities and nations, we humans have encroached on the landscape with all manner of buildings and other developments that have changed nature. What if instead we incorporated nature into the things we build? That’s the basic idea behind biomimicry – to design and build more sustainable structures that borrow from nature by emulating how it has already solved many of the problems we face.

Green-building expert Beth Brummitt, president of Brummitt Energy Associates Inc., a San Diego consulting firm specializing in energy modeling for high-performance buildings, introduced the concepts of biomimicry and presented examples of how they can be used in building design during a lunch and learn workshop held at CCSE in February.

Brummitt showed how the very principles that have made life on earth successful during the past 3.8 billion years can be turned into design approaches and performance criteria that borrow from ecosystem engineering. For example, among the ways organisms create conditions conductive to life are by using shape and chemistry, instead of more materials and energy.

Learning from Termites & Plants

A lowly African termite, Macrotermes michaelseni, builds towering dirt mound structures, not to live in but to serve as a ventilation system for their subterranean nests. By lining their mounds with tunnels and strategically placed openings, the termites maintain the temperature down inside their nests to within one degree, day and night, while outside temperatures swing from 35° to 110° F. In Harare, Zimbabwe, the Eastgate Building office complex has an air conditioning system modeled on these mounds that uses 90 percent less energy for ventilation than comparable buildings and has already saved more than $3.5 million in air conditioning costs.

Plants have inspired a new technology of solar cells that mimic photosynthetic processes to generate solar energy. These solar cells use a variety of photosensitive dyes to capture, separate and transport light energy rather than the silicon-based photovoltaic materials used in traditional solar cells. In addition to being potentially cleaner and cheaper to produce, the dye-sensitive cells are flexible and can be integrated into window panes, paints and other surface materials. There’s still development needed to bring these cells up to the output of traditional cells, but they hold great promise for wide-scale application. More examples can be found at the Biomimicry Institute.

Living Building Challenge

According to Brummitt, one of the leading efforts to bring biomimicry to architecture is the Living Building Challenge (LBC), a green building program devised by the Cascadia Region Green Building Council. Originated in 2006, the challenge asks, “What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place?”

Cascadia says their inspirational challenge is a philosophy and advocacy tool as well as a certification program. It distinguishes itself from other green building standards by reaching past “greener”’ buildings into restorative design and by measuring actual performance to ensure design goals are met. Any certified Living Building must be net zero energy, net zero water, fully nontoxic, provide for habitat restoration on sister sites, include urban agriculture, promote social equity, and be inspirational. The program is comprised of seven performance areas – site, water, energy, health, materials, equity and beauty.

One of the first “Living Buildings” is the Living Learning Center at the Tyson Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. The 2,900-square-foot facility houses a computer lab, classrooms and offices and is constructed with locally grown red cedar siding and many salvaged finishing materials. The space taken up by the building footprint was balanced by the purchase of equivalent natural habitat. All water for building use is collected from the roof and stored in an underground tank where it is filtered and made potable. Solar panels achieve net zero energy use.

Take a Look Around

“Biomimicry gives us a new language of thinking – we look at things we have always looked at, but begin to see them in a new way,” Brummitt said. “Nature’s success is our inspiration, where we find an amazing array of potential solutions for our products, buildings, businesses and society. Using this as our guide, imagine the more prosperous and beautiful world we can create!”

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