Touching the Earth Like a Leaf

Image by WhiteDesign

Our office is attempting an exciting new project: Our own office! Architects designing their own spaces are always fun commissions. Today at lunch we discussed our beginning ideas for the sustainable design to be built on a tight site located adjacent to the floodplain along Stewart Creek in the Belvedere Business Park on Rozzelles Ferry. The generative component of our design will be the leaves of trees. Above is an example I found of a building designed by WhiteDesign in the UK that touches the ground as lightly as a leaf.

I discussed using the capillary action induced by the transpiration of leaves as a concept we could carry into the building's solutions for the movement of air (and heated water?) through our building...Can we perhaps come up with an innovative structural/material analogue?

Here are some potential images for inspiration:

What can leaves do?

Of course, shade and refract light, much like these screens (we discussed the elegant veining structure of many leaves in the images we saw at lunch today):

Image also by WhiteDesign

What can leaves do?

Roast Quails (envelop and retain moisture even in the face of drastic changes of temperature):

More later! This shall have to be series for this blog...