Bio-Inspired Solutions for Climate Responsive Sustainable Architecture

This paper studies natural organisms and plants along with their features that can be utilized to formulate better design-strategies for climate responsive buildings. The conventional buildings are often far away from the concept of sustainability. Bio-mimicry uses nature as a model, measure and mentor to formulate bio-inspired solutions. These bio-inspired solutions give us more unswerving building systems, responsive to climatic changes in the surroundings, thus reflecting bio-mimetic design as a sustainable paradigm. In this paper, few organisms and plants were closely observed, and their innate, behavioural and evolutionary characteristics were studied. Following which, a strategy was developed to design a framework that eventually aided us in emulating their properties and characteristics in the architectural design to give us more environmentally sustainable buildings. A group of 20 design students were asked to design a climate-responsive building with and without the help of the proposed framework. Preliminary observations show that the designs obtained with the aid of this framework are likely to be more sustainable and climate-responsive. Subsequently, an android application namely- ‘PRAKRITI 1.0’ was developed to aid the designers in developing biomimetic building design. Furthermore, a comprehensive database of various natural organisms and plants needs to be incorporated in the framework and ‘PRAKRITI’ Application to provide more creative, innovative and robust design solutions. Such bio-inspired design solutions would help us create climate responsive and sustainable buildings, which would be a part of future sustainable cities.