Exploration Architecture: Designing with Nature

The Architecture Foundation, installed within Central London Project Space, presents "Exploration Architecture: Designing with Nature," the first ever solo show of Exploration, an immersive display and striking 3D printed installation showcases a selection of four projects and prototypes from the studio’s cutting-edge research on sustainable, nature-inspired design, including two new, previously unpublished designs.

Study models, sketches and specially commissioned short films introducing Exploration’s projects are presented alongside a myriad of natural specimens that inspired the designs – offering unique insight into the studio’s practice of learning from nature in order to deliver future-facing solutions for architecture, systems design and materials production that address the major challenges of our age.

At a time when architecture and society more broadly urgently need to reconsider their relationship to the natural world and move towards a more ecologically sustainable future, the exhibition offers a timely showcase of biomimicry, and the innovative approach to design and resource use it offers.

Showcasing Exploration’s working philosophy and embracing 3D printing’s capacity for radically increased resource efficiency, the exhibition’s central installation takes the form of a long sweeping display designed to showcase innovative SKO software – a structural optimisation computer programme based on the adaptive growth patterns of trees and bones – and has been created with support from large-scale 3D printing pioneer Lukas Oehmigen of BigRep and Ultimaker.

Designing with Parameters – What’s Next? Thurs 27 February 2014, 7pm.

Curated by Exploration Architecture and The Architecture Foundation.
Venue.- The Architecture Foundation. Ground Floor East. 136–148 Tooley St. London SE1 2TU. UK.
Dates.- 7 February – 15 March, 2014.

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MICHAEL PAWLYN

Michael Pawlyn established Exploration in 2007 to focus exclusively on biomimicry. In 2008 Exploration was short-listed for the Young Architect of the Year Award and the internationally renowned Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Prior to setting up the company Michael Pawlyn worked with Grimshaw architects for ten years and was central to the team that radically re-invented horticultural architecture for the Eden Project. He was responsible for leading the design of the Warm Temperate and Humid Tropics Biomes and the subsequent phases that included proposals for a third Biome for plants from dry tropical regions. Pawlyn has lectured widely on the subject of sustainable design in the UK and abroad, and in May 2005 delivered a talk at the Royal Society of Arts with Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface. In 2007 he delivered a talk at Google’s annual ‘Zeitgeist’ conference and in 2011, became one of only a small handful of architects to have a talk posted on TED. com. In the same year, his book Biomimicry in Architecture was published by the Royal Institute of British Architects. He is currently working on a range of biomimicry-based architectural projects and a book commissioned by TED (planned for completion/release early 2014).

Published on: February 24, 2014

Cite: "Exploration Architecture: Designing with Nature" METALOCUS. Accessed

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