Michael Pawlyn

Michael Pawlyn. Photo: Kelly Hill Photography

Michael Pawlyn is a pioneer of elegant, planet friendly architectural solutions inspired by nature or biomimicry. Working collaboratively with scientists, he has designed bridges supported by pressurised air contained in thin membranes, and naturally cooled data-storage facilities buried deep in mountains. His practice, Exploration Architecture, recently realised the Sahara Forest Project: a complex of greenhouses in the Qatari desert inspired by the dew harvesting capacity of the Namibian beetle.

For me, innovation is about wanting to find a way to solve problems. It’s also about mining biomimicry for its possibilities. When we started working on the biomimetic office building, we weren’t sure how much biomimicry would yield in terms of solutions.

Actually, it proved to be very fruitful. Having put together an excellent team, we proposed some really significant breakthroughs in terms of how we would bring light into the building.

The big revelation for me came in September 2003, working on the Eden Project. I went on a one-week intensive course at Schumacher College [an international educational facility in Devon championing sustainable thinking and practice] and discovered the breadth of solutions that biomimicry offers — far more than just speedier webs and termite mounds.

Model and visual for a biomimetic office. Photo: Exploration Architecture

Now, what we like to do when we’re tackling a new challenge is get a group of polymaths together and let the conversation wander off towards the most idealised solutions using biomimicry. It’s always a group of people specific to the task in hand, which adds freshness to the approach — biologists, ecologists, engineers, material experts, chemists. We focus on the functional challenge and see how that has been delivered in biology. From that ideal, we come back to something that is achievable with the constraints we have to work within. Unless you take the time to identify the ideal to start with you are far less likely to arrive at something innovative.

The key thing is to be open to new ideas. There is an area that we are exploring, connected to what we do, called bioTRIZ. The forerunner of that is ‘TRIZ,’ a Russian problem-solving methodology, invented by Genrich Altshuller — a patent clerk in Cold-War Russia and massively overqualified for such a boring job.

He developed a whole series of inventive principles he extracted from thousands of patents that he analysed in order to identify the most promising inventive principles. His theories have been developed by Professor Julian Vincent, who we work with quite a lot and doctors Olga and Nikolay Bogatyrev. They have done the equivalent analysis with the solving of problems in biology. Biology uses far less energy to solve problems, usually by manipulating structures. It’s a very interesting area.

When it comes to areas most in need of innovation, I think it would have to be education. I have just finished writing the second edition of my book Biomimicry in Architecture, and I introduce the final chapter with an anecdote about Peter Smithson when he was interviewed for the job of running London’s Architectural Association in the early Eighties. It goes as follows: in the first year, the students would redesign the world because when you are 18 you can. In the second year, students would design a city. In the third year they would design a major public building. In the fourth year they would design a house, and in the fifth year they would detail it.

Model and visual for a biomimetic office. Photo: Exploration Architecture

I really do think it’s time that architects started with a sense of planetary limits and opportunities, and an understanding of the really broad, political, environmental and social context for which they have to design. Quite a lot of the avant-garde in the profession seem to be fixated on designing for the haute-couture end of the market. It’s a good test for architects to ask themselves on a regular basis: what would be my ideal project? Very often, it seems the answer would be something like designing a headquarters for a luxury brand. That feels very disengaged.

One of the curious things about the present day is that we have nearly all the solutions we need to address the multiple challenges humanity faces, but there is nowhere near enough urgency in implementation. VS