TRANSFORMATION - Space / structure

Petra Gruber
Transarch, Zentagasse 38, 1050 Wien

Barbara Imhof
LIQUIFER, Obere Donaustraße 97-99/1/62, A-1020, Vienna, Austria

ABSTRACT

Engineers, designers and architects often look to nature for inspiration. Nature has perfected its designs through billions of years of evolution, so mimicking its creations is a sure way of producing technologies that are both efficient and reliable. There is nothing new about borrowing design ideas from nature, but now this has received a new name [bionics or biomimetics] and it is taking the world by storm. As a scientific discipline, bionics (biomimetics) deals systematically with the technical execution and implementation of constructions, processes and developmental principles of biological systems. This also includes various forms of interaction between living and non-living elements and systems.

Present and future robotic missions to the Moon [SMART-1 (ESA), SELENE (Japan), Chandrayaan-1 (India), CHANG'E-1 (China), South Pole-Aitken Basin Sample Return (USA)] and Mars [Mars Express (ESA), Beagle-2 (ESA), Rovers Spirit and Opportunity (USA), Mars Odyssey (USA)] will serve as precursors to future human missions to our planetary neighbors. Future long-duration human missions will have direct implications for the architecture of the space habitats. Therefore it is timely to explore this field and also to look for the overlaps in terrestrial and extra-terrestrial architecture for possible spin-ins and spin-offs.

Using specific research in the fields of space exploration and/or bionics (biomimetics) as the foundation, 5 different architectural projects based on a scientific-technological concept were developed at the HB 2 department in 2004.