(photo: Arup Associates)
These objects, both beautiful and insect-friendly, can be found in several city parks in London. Insect hotels come in many shapes and sizes, and these ones prove they can be very appealing to people and insects alike. For this insect hotel, the designers used a design strategy called ‘bionics’ or ‘biomimicry’. With biomimicry, natural phenomena are translated into new products, materials, architecture or even computer programs. For this design, they looked at a seemingly irregular structure that is very common in nature. This pattern is also called to the Voronoi diagram, after the mathematician Georgy Voronoi, who was the first to describe this pattern of polygons touching at the corners. This pattern is sometimes regular, for instance in beehives, and sometimes irregular, for instance in the wings of dragonflies. It is possible to make a solid construction with this pattern using a minimum of material. Here, the pattern was used to create a self-supporting structure for the ceramic object. Natural materials were used to fill the openings in different ways. As a result, a great variety of insects feel at home in it.
-London (UK) 2012
-Simon Swietochowski and Mick Brundle , ARUP Associates
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