Biomimicry in Architecture, 2nd Edition

Applying biomimicry: practice guide for architects

What skills do you need?

• You need to know enough about other disciplines to ask the right questions (e.g. by understanding how an engineer parses a system and the vocabulary of biology)
• You will need a biologist to be part of the process as early as possible
• The best collaborators are polymaths, able to work across domains; to be a good architect, you have to develop as a polymath too
• Cultivate systems thinking, learning to identify elements, interconnections, overall purposes
• Widen your set of design approaches and familiarise yourself with the two main approaches to biomimicry: top-down (starts with the design problem, identifies how equivalent problems have been solved in biology and then ...