Biomimicry, Art, and Architecture

I had a pleasant surprise earlier this afternoon that I thought I’d mention. A docent who was leading a small group of us through an exhibition of contemporary art and concepts in modern architecture happened to mention that a certain designer’s works were aimed at minimizing energy in the heating and cooling of our buildings.  Better yet, the artist/architect had been trained as a biologist, and had gotten her ideas from the way grasshoppers cool themselves in the hot summer afternoons. 

Wow.  Biomimicry at work again.  For thousands of years, and in earnest since the time of Aristotle, we’ve been learning about nature.  Much more recently, however, we’ve found out that we can learn from nature – and that’s what biomimicry is all about.  It took literally billions of years to evolve today’s grasshopper.  A few decades ago, a few bright people started to ask: Isn’t there something we can learn from all that enormous investment of time and resources – simply by looking at the little guy and the way he deals with the challenges he faces in his day-to-day life?  In this case, and many thousands of others, the answer is yes.

Remember the concept of bimetallic strips, used in thermometers?  When the temperature changes, one side expands or contracts faster than the other, causing the whole device to bend.  Imagine a really cool looking piece of art, made of this stuff, that serves to open or close air ducting, as explained in the article linked here.  As it turns out, the grasshopper has an analogous approach to letting off unwanted body heat.