Biology and architecture:An ongoing hybridization of scientific knowledge and design practice by six architectural offices in France

As a highly interdisciplinary field,architecture is being influenced by many subjects of natural and social sciences.Biology despite being apparently distant from architecture is currently a scientific field blending into design practices,which have evolved and shifted towards a new hybrid framework.In this article,we present an emerging design field of what we categorize as biomimetic architecture pioneering by six architectural offices in France.We observe the impact of scientific researches on design processes and practices through six case studies led by these offices,which can be seen through the actors who involved in various types of interdisciplinary collaborations,through the competencies of the architect himself,and through new sources of ideas coming from biological sciences and related fields.We propose to use a classification of theoretical uses in modeling practice to better understand the role that biological knowledge plays in architectural design practices.Finally,the result of this analysis shows that the use of biology taking place in a design space has external purposes,which transform it to produce engineering devices or urban schemes rather than architectural projects.It also shows that biology in architectural design induces other kinds of non-biological knowledge,is not strictly theoretical and could be obsolete or approximate.These findings lead to an epistemological discussion concerning the confusion between biological,knowledge,and architectural design‘know-how’.

Forcing biological sciences into architectural design: On conceptual confusions in the field of biomimetic architecture

Certain confusion may be observed in the field of biomimetic architecture,as it emerges at the crossroad of two disciplinary domains:architectural design and biological sciences.If biomimetics is defined as a science,once it is applied to architecture,biomimetic architecture should logically be defined as a science too.This assertion collides with the nature of architectural design,which may rather be defined as a technology:its aim is to transform the world,not to explain it.On the one hand,there is no obvious relationship between architecture and life sciences.On the other hand,the biomimetic approach tends to redefine the concept of science itself by seeking to avoid the excesses of scientism.Moreover,existing applications of biomimetic design show that it is difficult to observe a genuine biomimetic architecture;most cases are closer to engineering component or urban planning and sometimes they involve little or no life sciences.The aim of this paper is to describe this conceptual confusion through two movements called“forcings”,occurring between design and science.These forcings are conceptualised as shifts between constructed scientific objects and given empirical objects.Models,used in biology as in architecture,allow these shifts by virtue of their double function.They are both tools for knowledge and for design,thus they may be conceptually forced into what they are not supposed to be,particularly in the field of biomimetic architecture where design process and scientific knowledge are said to meet.