Biomimicry Design Toolkit for Tropical Building Facades – An Introduction

Biomimicry Design Toolkit for Tropical Building Facades – Elephant Skin Inspired Facade

Elephant Skin Inspired Cooling Tiles for building facades

Cooling the world is Warming the Planet.

With Asia rapidly urbanizing, the demand for cooling services is expected to increase exponentially.

How can solutions from nature reduce the energy used to cool a building’s interior spaces in the tropics?

Cue: Biomimicry, t

the practice to mirror strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges. Biomimicry is an underutilised tool with enormous potential to transform the built environment and its response to rising temperatures.

In nature, the ‘skins’ of organisms, facilitate such thermoregulation.

For buildings, an optimally designed facade can reduce heat gain and use less energy to cool a building’s interior spaces.

This Toolkit hopes to create a bedrock for biomimetic facade innovation and mainstream the adoption and implementation of biomimicry to achieve greater efficiency in solving the persistent challenge of thermal comfort in the built tropical environment.