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For more than a century, modern day construction has used materials primarily produced by manufacturing or mass production. Neri Oxman, a professor at MIT, pointed out that since the industrial revolution, the world of design has been dominated by this model. “Assembly lines dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architecture, who were trained to think about their objects as a result of parts with different functions.” This concept lays in stark contract to natural processes, “where similar cells transform and adapt to perform different functions, and structures are optimized for a multiplicity of functions at various scales: structural load, environmental pressures, spatial restriction, and so on.” Instead of assembling parts, natural structures grow, which begs the question, can materials be like that too?
ArchDaily looks at how we are just beginning to understand the adaptive solutions developed by nature over billions of years, and how we can explore these concepts to further develop new technologies applied to the needs of areas such as the construction industry.
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