Abstract
The growing worldwide urbanisation trend, together with an equally global energy crisis, is forcing a new stance in building processes. The studies made to date conclude that the global contribution of energy consumption of the building sector has surpassed that of other industries. Nowadays, great care is taken regarding the reduction of operational energy consumption during the useful life of the building. However, looking into minimising the embedded or incorporated energy consumption is fairly recent. This relates to the energy that the making of the building has consumed right up to minute zero, that is, the very beginning of its useful life. The revolution 4.0 offers opportunities that allow for new investigations in the reduction of material during the building and structural processes in construction. And taking a closer look into the examples nature has to offer is the starting point. In the process of creating living forms, nature takes into account the relationship between mass and energy. Evolution in living organisms has been progressing towards a lightening up of mass to the point of making vacuum a constant in every step of the scale. And this is the very reason why air is a great ally for both the stability and the resistance of structures. Its great advantage is that air does not carry embodied energy. Some examples of naturally forming lightweight structures are revised in this chapter. The composition of a fragment of a tree trunk is taken here as a case study by delving into it through the computer modelling of its composition and geometry. Thanks to digital computing, it has been found that in a given tree trunk bulk, the presence of vacuum is quantified as 58% of the total. And with the tree being one of the slenderest natural shapes in the planet, of mighty resistance and longevity, this chapter opens up a line of investigation that establishes bridges with nature towards creating the architecture of building “as light as air”.
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Cervera Sardá, M.R., Martínez, I.C. (2023). Bio-inspired Lightweight Structural Systems: Nature-Inspired Architecture. In: Cervera Sardá, M.R., Dușoiu, EC., Lascu, T.N. (eds) Architecture Inspired by Nature. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33144-2_1
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