Biowall is a woven scaffold that becomes a partition when colonized by living plants. In their attempt to create a modular building system based on structures found in nature, the designers looked at several geometries, such as Penrose tiles (pairs of shapes that tile a plane so that no section of the pattern is repeated) and Synetic structures (airy, lacelike basketries of thin arcs over which pressure is evenly distributed). They opted for a weave of twelve small circles made of one-millimeter fiberglass rods around which the plants could grow and creep. “The construction is based on the principle of self-similarity, translating a biological construction from the nanoscale to the macroscale. It can be seen in our natural environment in the formation of bubbles, living cells, and water molecules,” the designers have explained.
Gallery label from Design and the Elastic Mind, February 24–May 12, 2008.
