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The English company Exploration Architecture, pioneer in biomimicry imagines buildings inspired by nature

4. Environment

Construction

Context

Exploration-Architecture, founded in London in 2007 by Michael Pawlyn, is a company of design, architecture and strategy. The CEO Michael Pawlyn wants to help companies and organizations to go beyond conventional approaches, and imagine a new strategy. The company is a pioneer in bio - mimicry applied to the building, inspired by what nature does best to find innovative solutions.

Objectives

  • Yielding imaginative and beautiful architecture and providing solutions to complex issues.
  • Achieving same outcome with a tenth or a hundredth of the resource input. Helping commercial clients to achieve same result with lower cost compared with conventional approach.
  • Waste management: group together a set of activities in the same building so that a waste may be used by another; implement circular economy (cycles of food, water, energy)

APPROACH

In 1997, Michael Pawlyn works with the architecture team Gimshaw  on the biomimicry  architecture. He participated in the  Eden construction project  in Cornwall,  on a former quarry of Kaolin, innovative greenhouses which become a centre of tourist and educational interest on biodiversity for future generations.

From its inception, in 2007, the Exploration Company helps clients in the design of buildings according to the principles of biomimicry architecture. A method is implemented :

1.    Identification of the problem : Briefing process with clients in order to understand the specific challenges of a particular product.
2.    Divergent phase: drawing on multiple research sources and exploring a wide range of ideas
- Brainstorm.
- Examples from biology, take ideas from nature.
3.    Convergent phase: all the proposals are assessed in terms of their suitability
- Find the most efficient and effective structure for the solution. 
- Adapt it to the context, translate nature solutions in order to solve human problems.

For doing this, they rely on an extensive network of specialists, material experts, scientists and engineers who collaborate and bring their expertise to the process. Their involvement varies from a keynote presentation, to delivering a series of innovation workshops, all the way through to the development of long-term strategies.

CONTRIBUTION TO COMPANY PERFORMANCE

  • Decrease in resources expenditures for the owner of the building thanks to the closed-loop model
  • A short payback period enabled by the efficiency of the recycling systems (2 years only for the zero waste textile factory in India)
  • Quick profitability through the recycling system (2 years only for the 'zero waste factory' in India)

Benefits

  • Shifting from a linear, wasteful, polluting way of using resources to a closed-loop model in order to get as close to zero waste as possible that don’t cause long-term damage to the environment.
  • Energy consumption minimized and a fossil fuel economy change to a solar economy step by step
  • The company helped a wide range of organizations succeed in the shift- from the industrial age to the ecological age of humankind.
  • Producing more solutions that address the major challenges of our age, like climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity and energy, food & water security.
  • Increasing in both productivity and employee retention as the result of environment transformation at work by showing a bionics design
Workforce
2 salariés (2014)
Turnover
NC
Country
United Kingdom

Contact

Michael Pawlyn ; Fondateur ; info@exploration-architecture

Mise à jour le 23/05/2016

Creative Commons Attribution This work by Réseau Alliances – World Forum Lille is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.