SILK PAVILION


Researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group created the Silk Pavilion using a robotic arm and 6,500 live silk worms. The project’s aim was to explore the relationship between digital and biological fabrication


Architect Neri Oxman led the research team that developed the Silk Pavilion


MATERIAL WORLD Digital fabrication has already pushed bio- mimicry to new frontiers, but Benyus says there’s still a long way to go. "With 3D print- ing, we can actually imitate life’s structures, but we need to get it right and use a small material palette," she says. "In the natural world there are only about fi ve common mate- rials, they are used over and over again but given functionality through structure." More than that, architects should take inspiration from nature's constant reuse of materials. “A product must be able to be disassembled at the end of its life," says Benyus. "You should be able to pop it into a bath that takes it back to its raw materials, which you can take and use once again for your printer." A number of architects have begun to investigate the potential of using animals to create building materials – turning them into "animal printheads," in the words of writer Geoff Manaugh. In one case, liquor company Dewar's used a bottle-shaped beehive to create a massive beeswax bottle. In another,


CLADmag 2015 ISSUE 1


a team led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology architect Neri Oxman guided 6,500 silkworms to create a dome around a simple metal frame. "Animal bodies can be guided, disciplined, or otherwise regulated to produce large-scale structures, from consumer objects to whole buildings," writes Manaugh. In other words, nature itself can be used to create architecture for humans. Though projects like these are often labelled as biomimetic, Benyus considers them retrograde. "It disturbs me," she says. She notes that bioutilisation ("Where we cut down a tree and use the wood") and bioassis- tance, like using bacteria to clean drinking water or using bees to make food, have been in practice for eons. "It's old technology," she says. And they are both practices that are open to abuse: "Whenever we use organisms to do our bidding, we do tend to apply our fetish of effi ciency onto them, and we tend to mess with them genetically.” Biomimicry learns from nature without exploiting it. "If you want to make ceramics, the toughest


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