The Chic Ecologist

Green Building Design or Engineering Problems? Ask Nature

Looking for that muse to help you with your design? Whether its for a green building, an eco-friendly clothing line, your sustainable home products, environmental projects, or even for your army of robots, nature has your answer. Just about every joint, color scheme, support structure and pattern has been refined and perfected over billions of years. Asknature.org is a design solution for your designers block. With case studies and specific examples of biomechanics and form + function in action are available for you to search.

Imagine 3.8 billion years of design brilliance available for free, at the moment of creation, to any sustainability innovator in the world.

Imagine nature’s most elegant ideas organized by design and engineering function, so you can enter “filter salt from water” and see how mangroves, penguins, and shorebirds desalinate without fossil fuels.

Now imagine you can meet the people who have studied these organisms, and together you can create the next great bio-inspired solution.

- Asknature.org

Created by the founder of the Biomimicry Institute, Janine Benyus, AskNature is a free public resource that can be researched no matter what your challenge. If you are a biologist who wants to share your expertise, or a architect, engineer, chemist, designer, or just curious about planet-friendly and nature inspired solutions. The site is sponsored by Autodesk, the creators of AutoCAD desktop software, a key product to aid in design.

Examples of investigated solutions are how organisms in nature filter air and water, gather solar energy, repel water, and create non-toxic dyes and glues. The public domain library hopes using biomimicry strategies will help create the next generation of sustainable, efficient buildings, products and designs.

Tags: Architecture, Biomimicry, Building, Design, Engineering, Green Design, nature

Recycling Religiously – Temple of Glass

Photo by Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters

Built with more than a million glass bottles, the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple in Thailand’s Sisaket province is quite the model for sustainable. Located about 600 km (370 miles) northeast of Bangkok, the

REUTERS/Chaiwat Subprasom

Thai Buddhist temple has found an environmentally friendly way to utilize discarded bottles and has used them to build everything in its premises, from a crematorium to shelters and toilets. I can imagine the amount of natural light and colors are simply breathtaking. Unfortunately i don’t live in Thailand and I couldn’t find much more information about it in English anywhere, but somehow it still seemed relevant to this blog.

[via china daily]

Tags: Building, glass, reclaimed, recycled, reuse, Temple