Friday, March 5, 2010

An iPhone App about Biomimetic Architecture: BioDesign #3 by Dennis Dollens



Dennis Dollens, the architect who grows buildings, has just made his work available via an iPhone App.

Dollens' latest comic carries on where his last one left off. It is about developing ideas to combine technology with biology in an architectural context. He is constantly studying plants and looking for biomimetic ideas to apply to buildings and designs, in order to create bio-architecture; clean, eco-friendly buildings that could filter pollution, harvest energy and much more.

In order to communicate these ideas and inspire others to come up with more, Dollens writes comic books. Most of them are available as downloadable PDFs via his site on Issuu, but now you can read BioDesign #3 as an iPhone application in a beautifully re-designed, much easier to handle, format.

Inspired by graphic novels and manga, BioDesign #3 illustrates Dollens' research and ideas to grow buildings just like plants, in order to create better functioning and more sustainable cities; cities as 'urban forests'. He uses the softwares Xfrog and Rhino, which allow the architect to create structures, panels or skins, mimicking branches, leaves and pots. One of the goals is to create functional services to interiors where for example reconfigured bio-robotic leaves could channel airflow for passive ventilation, air filtration, noise reduction, environmental monitoring, as well as supplemental power.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

He's using ParaCloud too. Great Work Dennis !