What is humanity for? What happens if we rethink not just the way we plan buildings, but our entire role as beings on a living planet? These are the central questions driving Michael Pawlyn's third edition of the life-changing book, Biomimcry in Architecture.
Michael Pawlyn is an architect, the founding director of Exploration Architecture Ltd and is a ground-breaking pioneer, not just of biomimicry as the design foundation of architecture and the built environment, but of the ways we might redesign humanity.
Before setting up his own practice, Michael was central to the team that radically re-invented horticultural architecture for the Eden Project. In 2018 he jointly initiated Architects Declare a Climate and Biodiversity Emergency which has since spread to 28 countries with over 8,000 companies signed up to a declaration of action. In addition to his architectural work he advises companies and governments on how to make the shift from sustainable to regenerative design. He lectures widely and his and his TED talk has been viewed over 2 million times, which gives you a sense of the scale and scope of the possibilities he opens up.
With Sarah Ichioka, he co-wrote the book 'Flourish' and we spoke to Sarah back in episode #147, but now Michael is back with the third edition of Biomimicry in Architecture, which came out on 1st September, and my goodness, this book has the capacity to change our world. If every key decision-maker on the planet had a copy of this book, and was given time to read it, our world would be a different place, because over and over again, Michael shows the ways that the natural world has designed things that are more efficient, stronger, more resilient than anything humanity has created - but that we can make things with them that the natural world has not imagined. More than anything this book re-iterates the fact that we are an integral part of the web of life and that by using our astonishing creativity, our capacity to see the design of an abalone shell, or the way a mussel roots in the seabed, or the ways palm leaves roll up in a hurricane or any of a thousand other almost-miraculous things—and then applying them in different contexts, we can create everything from surgical drills that can bend round corners to whole tidal lagoons that create and store power and offer whole new biomes. If we set the flourishing of all life as our goal, we can co-create miracles.
As will be obvious in the conversation you're about to hear, this book lit up so many parts of my heart and my mind - there is so much we can do if we bring the best of ourselves to the table and Michael Pawlyn is one of those thought-leaders who has ranged right to the edge of what we know and what we can do and brought the results to the rest of us in a way that's intriguing, inspiring and invigorating. Whatever else you do this year, you need to read this book. Buy it, share it, tell your friends. This is how we change the world. So, with that endorsement ringing in your ears...
Book - Biomimicry in Architecture https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/biomimicry-in-architecture-michael-pawlyn/1341162
TED talk - using Nature's Genius in Architecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QZp6smeSQA
Biomimicry Talk at UNITE summit https://youtu.be/XZbv9tc3Prc/
Episode #147 with Sarah Ichioka on 'Flourish' which she co-wrote with Michael: https://accidentalgods.life/flourish-designing-new-paradigms/
‘Human Layers’ workshop developed by The Long Time Project based on Joanna Macey’s work https://www.thelongtimeacademy.com/toolkit
Survival of the Fittest: From ESG to Competitive Sustainability - paper from Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership https://www.cisl.cam.ac.uk/files/from_esg_to_competitive_sustainability.pdf
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