Biomimicry·kinetics·sustainability

There has been long a pursuit in architecture to make buildings respond to climate.Over the past decades, the development of intelligent building and envelopetechnologies has promised opportunities that buildings and envelopes are able to besmart, kinetic and sustainable. Based on the innovation nature of biologicalacclimatization related to climate, the research conducted through bio-inspired designmethods proposes that: natural models' acclimatization can be translated to buildingenvelopes design aiming at building sustainability. In the tendency of interactivearchitecture and urban environments, this translation can be combined with kineticfeatures and in turn shape―Bio-inspired Kinetic Envelopes‖. The research presents aninnovative and unique insight into architecture at the level of both design methods andtheories.The research focuses on three main issues——bio-inspired design, kineticarchitecture and sustainable design, and integrates these three topics by a newresearch method related to BIM (Building Information Modeling) parametric design.This dissertation includes seven chapters. The first chapter proposes questions anddefines the research hypothesis. The second chapter about literature reviews embracesthe issues of building envelope, kinetic architecture and bio-inspired design, and itprovides the theory foundation to this study. The following three chapters areaccording to the processes of bio-inspired design:1) Defines the research subjects(typology study and exploration on kinetic architecture and kinetic envelope in theThird Chapter, and study on the energy transfer from building envelopes in the FifthChapter);2) Reframes the problems (the analogy study between biology and buildingenvelopes in the Fourth Chapter);3) Biological solutions search (analysis andcollections on biological models related to acclimatization in the Fourth Chapter);4)Principle extraction from acclimatization (bio-inspired design frameworks fromnatural models in the Fourth Chapter);5) Experimental application (design process ofbio-inspired kinetic building envelopes by using the BIM parametric method in theSixth Chapter). Among this process, the experimental application is through a designcase study related to specific biological model, which aims at establishing the wholestructure of research and generalizing the design process of bio-inspired kineticenvelopes. The final chapter restate the research results including the typology of kineticarchitecture and envelopes, the design framework inspired by biologicalacclimatization, the energy transfer and distributions from building envelopes, theBIM parametric method, the3D model representation of the design and thedevelopment of the bio-inspired kinetic building envelope.