How can biophilic design improve industrial sustainability? (2024)

Biophilic design employs living strategies found in nature to solve environmental and social challenges. Translating biological strategies involves three essential elements—emulation, habitation, and interconnection. Emulation means to learn from and replicate natural forms, mechanisms, and ecosystems to make regenerative buildings and manufactured products. Habitation makes all environments conducive to life by knowing how living things and humanity thrive together. Interconnection is the inclusion of nature to all things in the built environment. Biophilic design provides empathetic, interconnected practices learned by mimicking designs found in nature applied to the creation of all contexts, processes and industries at any scale.

En architecture le design biophilique est très tendance et à pour but de créer un environnement architecturé en symbiose avec la nature. Des espaces qui permettent habiter de manière apaisée.

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Biophilic design is pivotal for reducing the carbon footprint of industrial buildings and achieving net-zero emissions. By integrating natural elements like greenery and maximizing natural light, biophilic designs minimize the need for artificial lighting and HVAC systems, thus reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions. Incorporating sustainable materials and construction methods further decreases embodied carbon. These innovative approaches contribute to achieving net-zero emissions by balancing any remaining carbon emissions with removal or offsetting strategies. Overall, biophilic design enhances the sustainability and resilience of industrial buildings while mitigating climate change.

Industrial spaces benefit from biophilc design to soften its aesthetic. While many rehabbed/historically renovated spaces (i.e. lofts) speak to the original integrity of a buildin, plants and other sustainable practices modernize the space for people to work.There's nothing like an attractive and environmentally conscious building to get others gathering again. A bonus is seeing a rather type-specific building renewed for new use.

Though biophilic design improves human well-being and connection with nature, it presents unique challenges to industrial facilities. Designers need to integrate biophilic features without compromising existing functionality or safety standards and use durable low-maintenance materials and strategies to withstand harsh environments. Regulatory compliant, cost-effective solutions that improve productivity, employee wellness, and ecological sustainability are essential. Biophilic designs must creatively leverage existing opportunities, reduce pollution, and promote acceptance without impeding operations or productivity. Life-cycle assessments and renewable energy uses are key for establishing biophilic design benefits in industrial settings.

Os desafios do design biofílico para instalações industriais incluem equilibrar requisitos funcionais, técnicos e estéticos, adaptação a diferentes contextos climáticos e geográficos, medição e avaliação de desempenho, engajamento do setor industrial e público, considerando alta temperatura, pressão, materiais perigosos, disponibilidade de recursos naturais, coleta de dados multidisciplinar, comunicação eficaz e iniciativas de participação.

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Most critical is to incorporate biophilic design using renewable energy for carbon-free manufacturing. Solar and wind energy can now generate sufficient power or heat for steel production, water desalination, enhanced oil recovery, and chemical/plastic production through concentrated solar-thermal power technologies. For example, EVRAZ in Pueblo, Colorado, uses a solar powered Electric Arc Furnace featuring 7.3 square kilometers of 750,000 solar panels to provide 90% of its electricity demand. Nucor’s $250 million micro mill in Sedalia, Missouri, is the first U.S. steel plant designed to run on wind energy, while Swiss company Panatère is melting steel with the world’s 1st industrial solar furnace without fuel or electricity.

First, designers explore design briefs, site surveys, objectives, process flows, and research to identify potential biophilic elements for incorporation. The team next creates affordable and feasible alternatives that best connect the project to nature. By monitoring biophilic components, the project team measures performance and outcomes based on productivity, sustainability and employee satisfaction. Biophilia puts professionals on notice: architects should recognize biophilic design is a significant factor in achieving human wellness and productivity, not abstract theoretical postulations, despite the lavish arguments in support. Neuroscience shows people react experientially to architectural stimuli rather than intellectual reasoning.

For the past 100 years, the profession has mostly celebrated architecture with industrial and technological forms and features. Most of this work purposefully attempts to separate humankind from the natural aesthetic to establish the domination of the machine aesthetic. Evidence of the antithetical opposition to nature within architecture abounds in expressionism, modernism, brutalism, minimalism, postmodernism, and deconstructivism. Unfortunately, this mastery over nature has done little to provide a nurturing world for its residents, while the stress-induced byproduct of this architecture has yielded nothing but barren self-regard for aesthetic abstraction and catastrophic debts to nature. It is time to build with nature rather oppose it.

Compartilhar experiências e casos de sucesso de implementação do design biofílico em instalações industriais pode ser muito inspirador. Além disso, explorar as possibilidades de parcerias entre empresas, instituições de pesquisa e órgãos governamentais para promover o desenvolvimento e a aplicação de práticas sustentáveis na indústria também é uma ótima ideia. A troca de conhecimento e a colaboração podem impulsionar a inovação e acelerar a adoção de soluções biofílicas nas instalações industriais.

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