On May 17, 2023, Prof. Wolfgang Weisser (Terrestrial Ecology, TUM) will talk about “Increasing human-nature interactions in the city by designing ECOLOPES- ecological building envelopes.”

Abstract:

Humans have separated themselves from the rest of nature and consider cities as the place of humankind, rather than as an environment where humans and other animals meet. Despite the fact that human planning does not consider animals, many species live in the urban environment and recent research unravels more and more positive effects of the interactions with nature for humans. Urbanisation and the densification of cities currently leads to an decrease of nature in cities and to combat this trend, nature, in particular animals, need to be included into urban planning procedures. We have developed the method Animal-Aided Design that allows to integrate the needs of animals into urban planning procedures, focusing largely on open spaces. The next step is that architecture itself claims responsibility for designing not only for the human stakeholder, but also for other stakeholders, such as animals. In the EU-funded project ECOLOPES we aim to develop a data-driven computational design strategy that will allow architects to include nature into the design of buildings. In contrast to existing approaches, ECOLOPES uses clear ecological objectives. The project focuses on the design of ecological building envelopes that should become multifunctional spaces where humans, animals, plants and even microbes can interact.

Registration: 

The TUM-IAS Wednesday Coffee talks are currently held online via Zoom. To register and to receive the Zoom link, please send an email to events@ias.tum.de.