The Pangolin's Guide to Biomimetics & Digital Architecture: Architecture & Biomimetics Series #1

Learning from graphic novels and anime, this manga-inspired comic book tours new ideas about the environment, design, digital and natural growth, and architecture in the work and writing of Dennis Dollens. The pangolin functions as a tour guide and mascot, frequently interjecting comments that make the brief format dense with illustrated ideas and modes of designing, yet comprehensible as an introduction to the experimental ideas. The comic illustrates how biomimetics—the search for form and systems in nature—can be used to integrate natural processes with experimental design and digital production to conceive, visualize, generate, and model architectural and design elements extrapolated from nature, and how that process has evolved in Dollens’ Santa Fe and Barcelona-based design and writing.

Looking to seeds, plants, trees, shells, etc., for new architectural forms via software, animation, digital modeling, and CAD-CAM (computer aided design/computer aided manufacturing) production, the comic book presents ideas for new, sustainable, nontoxic materials while also considering how sustainable environments can be integral with technical innovation and contemporary form. The comic suggests how biological materials are on the horizon and how they might be conceived of as contributing to the environment in a potentially “intelligent” manner.

Since the late 1990s Dollens has experimented with and manipulated software for growing plants and trees, not only in order to grow interlocked, branching structures (trusses), but also to investigate the possibilities of leaf and pod-like volumes revisualized and redesigned as units and clusters for prototypes of floors and walls, rooms and skyscrapers. The resulting digital models and graphic renderings stem from radical software (Xfrog-Rhino-Studio MAX) hybridization. Yet, the resulting sphere or cube clusters retain plantlike aspects of phyllotaxic distribution, phototropic or gravitropic orientation, and/or Fibonacci-like proportions, giving the models a digital-biological heritage.

Specifically, the comic illustrates how “digitally grown” experimental works nurtured in the plant-generating software (Xfrog) can be built as rapid prototype models, further suggesting how nature and computation can produce a collaborative approach to architecture, design, and fabrication.