忘记首席可持续发展官。最新的建筑工作是仿生主管

Let’s talk about elephants for a second. These magnificent mammals have been on this planet forover 55 million years。他们中的许多人生活在干旱，干旱的气候中，因此由于皮肤上的皱纹网络，他们学会了保持凉爽，这有助于他们trap moisture并保持冷静。

What if buildings could do the same?

This question is the core principle behind the ever-growing practice of biomimicry, or the act of imitating nature’s designs and processes in man-made systems. Think plane wings modeled after a bird’s wings, orVelcroinspired by the tiny hooks at the ends of bur needles. Popularized by American biologist Jenine Benyus in 1997, biomimicry is now seeing renewed urgency as a design solution to the climate crisis.

自2007年以来，杰米·米勒（Jamie Miller）一直将仿生原则付诸实践，并为设计公司提供咨询，并在OCAD University教授加拿大唯一的仿生计划。米勒（Miller）是一名设计师兼工程师，由Benyus亲自培训，然后继续找到他的咨询公司仿生前沿。现在，米勒已被聘为加拿大建筑公司B+H的第一任仿生型主管，该公司在全球范围内拥有项目。他的头衔是建筑领域的第一个标题之一，但它暗示着长期以来一直在与自然战斗的行业中的观点发生了重大转变，而不是与之合作。

A frontrunner in biomimicry

Since he joined B+H in November of last year, Miller has been involved in several residential master plans from Ontario to Gabon, as well as the design of a residential house in India. He says that forest canopies, mangroves, and silk spiders can all teach us how to design more efficient, sustainable buildings. For the design of the house in Bengaluru, India, for instance, the firm is using various cooling strategies inspired by elephant skin and termite mounds, all the while recreating a garden ecosystem inspired by how forests work. The elephant skin, for example, inspired them to create a passive cooling wall made of stones stacked on top of each other, while the termite mounds inspired the design of multiple vents that pull in cold air and push out hot air, much like the tunnels inside a mound. “What’s exciting is that we’re now exploring how to embed biomimicry into all facets of B+H,” he says.

米勒（Miller）咨询了B+H多年，但他说，成为团队不可或缺的一部分，他可以更快地建立关系，并将仿生原理注入室内设计和体验设计等领域。他说：“让我加入船，可以将我纳入任何团队。”

A sign of progress

近年来，dramatic riseof chief sustainability officers—in design and architecture, but also among Fortune 500 firms—has shown the increased importance that organizations are placing on environmental issues. But for Miller, biomimicry isn’t just a subset of sustainability, it’s the foundation. “Biomimicry is the only model of sustainability we have, based on how long it’s been around and how few years humans have been around,” he says.

现实是，我们是一个年轻的物种，而大自然有足够的时间教树木pump water从它们的根部到顶部的叶子，再到白蚁殖民地如何用隧道建造土墩。米勒说：“一旦看到自然是数十亿年的经过时间考验的解决方案的高潮，您就会从某些东西转向可以真正教会我们的东西。”

A tool for climate change

最后，米勒将仿生型视为减轻气候变化的驱动因素，长期以来，它被标记为“邪恶问题”，因为它依赖于许多相互依存的因素，似乎无法解决。但是，米勒认为解决方案很困难，因为我们不断利用过去的想法并延续了我们一直犯的同样的错误。他说：“仿生型使我们能够抛弃并以不同的方式看待世界。”

Ecosystems are great at sequestering carbon, while silk spiders have perfected the art of weaving a very strong material without exerting any energy (compared to, say, the energy we use to extract materials and construct buildings). “We have to shift the paradigm we use to design and let nature into it,” he says, not just by making room for greener spaces, but also by finding ways to integrate the kinds of processes we see in nature into the building environment. For our buildings and cities to really emulate nature, however, we need to go back and redesign the building blocks that make up our buildings, both literally and figuratively. If we want adaptive buildings, we need to design adaptive materials. If we want low-energy buildings, we need to come up with low-energy processes.

And if we can’t figure out how to do it, then we should look to nature—because it probably already has.