Come join us this Thursday, December 8th (2-6pm in 108 Wurster Hall), for our final review of Studio One this Fall 2016!

Studio One students will present their ongoing work and will discuss with invited guests. Studio One is our post-professional one-year Master program and has a much more inquiry-oriented, experiment-based, and project-driven research agenda in comparison to the other studios in the MArch program.

The theme of Studio One is “Bio-inspired Design and Fabrication” and we are looking into plants and insects as potential role models for architectural innovation. In our work we are simultaneously following a bottom-up and top-down approach. The bottom-up approach refers to the students’ basic biomimetic studies on plants and insects. The aim is to illustrate how biological construction and motion principles might inspire the development of new technical fabrication processes and/or lightweight and adaptive devices that could be transferred into architectural facades and building components. For the top-down approach the students have formed larger teams and were asked to envision a new tropical glasshouse (& insectarium) for UC Berkeley’s Botanical Garden. The brief is to design a new signature project for the botanical garden that is not only a sustainable, energy-efficient growing environment for its world-renowned collection of living plants and insects but could also become the garden’s new key attraction for tourists and scholars. The building itself should thereby envision a glasshouse of the 21st century that is in step with the exciting innovations in emerging fields like biomimetics. Finally, UC Berkeley would also like to use this glasshouse as an informative platform to showcase the cutting-edge research initiatives on campus under the theme “Design Innovation from Nature.”