Performance Driven Structural Design: Biomimicry in Structure

Since last century one of the iconic dichotomy that divides architectural designers into two groups performance and appearance. It is to our benefit to reconcile the performance-appearance debate and to provide an unambiguous definition of the related notions. And natural organism and system is a great model to follow. Biomimicry is the study of emulating and mimicking nature, where it has been used by designers to help in solving human problems1Biomimicry as an emerging field since late 1980s has been looking at advanced technologies derived from bio-inspired engineering at the different levels; however,the research of biomimicry application in the structure design field is lagging behind other design related fields, such as product design and material design. The paper is to provide a framework to answer the question: How do we make biomimicry concepts practical in the context of structural design and from what key perspectives? And to address how performance and appearance could be blended into one and measured and verified as a whole. This paper will address two important factors influencing structure performance: form-pattern making and the properties of materials. Numerous case studies will be used to demonstrate a variety of strategies corresponding to different levels of performance-driven structure design based on bioengineering. This paper aims to integrate material science and biology study into the research of architectural structure design.