Bioclimatical Prototype of ACCOMMODATING AND NECTARIFEROUS GARDEN BUILDING by Husos

Descripción del proyecto por Diego Barajas, Camilo García and Francisco Amaro

This project, ongoing for a decade already, has been about the design and construction of a bioclimatic building in the center of Cali and later in the management of different activities to encourage environmental care initiatives among its inhabitants and visitors. The building is an Accommodating and Nectariferous Garden for Cali butterflies, which include homes and workspaces. It arised as a commission to design a building for Taller Croquis, a small clothing and decorative attelier in that city, but whose territory began to spread in an archipelago of small distribution points around the world.

On one hand, the green facade generates an inside microclimate of comfort which reduces energy consumption. On the other, it allows the building to function as a home garden production prototype insect-and-bird-friendly with the local species, which depends on a network of biological corridors to move from one place to another. This is achieved in two ways. The first is to use vegetation linked to the local ecosystem, mainly nectariferal and accomodating plants for butterflies, shrubs and creepers which, in turn, are part of the habitat of birds and other local insects. The second, which runs parallel to the building design garden and has developed with the collaboration of biologists and Cali Zoo, is to spread the word within the neighborhood of the uniqueness and biological significance of Cali in the world, explaining the ways in which the garden-building helps in taking care of them and encouraging similar actions in domestic natural gardens of residents and visitors.

Both the garden-building and the different actions of dissemination, have served as an indirect business strategy for the atelier, within a space of exploration, of what it can be multiple forms of a "caleña identity" (although transnational) of the store, which has reinforced its links with the neighborhood and the city, while expanding in different parts of the world through its small but broad sales network.

Micro landscaping and management of a social and natural environment
The commission was developed through two complementary structures: The building by itself as a physical platform for making direct biological actions in addition to responding to the everyday uses of its inhabitants, and Proyecto Cali as a group of research, management and dissemination of knowledge about the local biodiversity. This emerged as a small collective made up by Husos, Taller Croquis and biologists from Madrid and Cali.

Search for the preexistence and the formation of alliances
When beginning the project, existing local actions that aimed to counter environmental degradation were investigated. An incipient but valuable initiative by Cali Zoo was found. Called Open Zoo: Gardens to the City, its intention was to encourage the creation of a network of gardens in schools that would attract native species of insects and birds, thus developing an educational work in the city. This project was enrolled in the zoo program and contributed with it,  providing technical support that was key during the process.

The EJHNMC in the biogeographic region of the Tropical Andes
Colombia remains as one of the 12 mega-diverse countries, concentrates a 10% of the total world's biodiversity in 0.7% of the Earth's surface. It is also among the three countries with the highest diversity of butterflies. Cali is just between two of the 34 sensitive areas of global biodiversity called hotspots. The knowledge of this wealth is little known and little internalized by the inhabitants of the neighborhood, city and region, proof of which is the fact that in many cases they are still planting commercial species in the gardens, often nonnative , much less endemic, contributing largely to the homogenization of the landscape, rather than trying to preserve its biodiversity and specificity. The project, through the garden design and informative work, sought to respond to the specificity of ecosystems in Cali, and to simultaneously make their unique value visible, both  in the world and between the neighbors.

Accommodating and Nectariferous Plants, Changing building
Acommodating plants of the building are home to butterflies and other insects in their stages of egg, caterpillar and chrysalis; Also serving as exclusive food leaves for caterpillars. The nectariferous plants are visited by different types of adult butterflies to feed on the nectar of flowers. Nectariferous species and accommodating species are interleaved so that in times of defoliation of the accommodating ones, there is still nectariferous cover.

Biometer building, Butterflies as bioindicators
The EJHNMC has functioned as a biometer or detector of state of the natural environment of the neighborhood. Butterflies are especially good indicators of changes in the diversity of species occurring as a result of anthropogenic environmental changes. Through the commercial activities of the workshop, residents and visitors are explained the biological and biometric operation of the building.

The EJHNMC as a catalyst for not-anthropocentric actions
Insects and birds that come to EJHNMC require the gardens and existing plants in the city, being necessary to foster its expansion and maintenance, so that a network of points and roads that are close to each other are created, a network through which they can move and that can also connect with non-urbanized areas around the city. During the last decade different micro actions such as the delivery of seeds and small plants of local species to the visitors of the building have been promoted. Workshops were organized with the neighborhood kids, explaining to neighbors and other visitors to the workshop the operation of the vertical garden through brochures and through the prints taht  travelled through the city and all over the world stuck on the atelier product labels. These actions aimed to help maintain the biological corridors within the city, inviting those who receive seeds to have them planedt on their balconies, porches and backyards.

Energy and bioclimatic
The EJHNMC uses subtle cooling strategies, necessary in a warm tropical climate like Cali, where the average annual temperature is 26 ° C throughout the year and with a relative humidity of 72% on average. The building separations of 1.2 meters from its neighbors, allows continuous flow of fresh air, which helps remove heat through the side walls while increasing in 250 sqm surface for vertical garden. This space is covered with different species of climbing plants, forming a layer of foliage that helps reduce temperatures inside while also providing shade. Additionally, the matt silver color chosen for walls and structure helps prevent heat absorption. The balconies with plants provide shade to the windows and space for pots. There is cross ventilation at all levels and spaces, thus eliminating the need for electric fans or air conditioning use.

In this prototype, animal species socially perceived as 'desirable', birds and butterflies for example, far from passively coexisting in the building as "pets" live as "Trojan horses". These species become the engine of different strategies of "eco-seduction" to facilitate complete care actions for the ecosystem and which allow the opening of a door to a greater understanding of it.

Through the design and management of the building garden, the project has worked as a set of multimedia affective devices that promote symbiotic relationships between the home-studia and its environment, recognizing them as entities that operate on different scales, from local to global. Social and natural processes have been carried out over time, have turned it into a testing laboratory on how to approach to some of the dynamics and temporality of "the biological parts" in the city from architecture and its management.