Ikelos
What if our buildings could behave like trees?
Over the years, our homes were built to establish the boundaries between humans and the extern, from individual protection and family care to real state business, we evolve building environments with new materials and technologies inside our living spaces to take care of ourselves. However, even with numerous construction innovation methods turning buildings more ecological, sustainable, greener, and even intelligent, we aren’t necessarily applying a more ecocentric approach to its conception.
When settling ourselves into a new environment, we aren’t just dividing but colonizing a specific place habited by a wide variety of species, appropriating their space and retaining as much as we can, like an ecological relation of parasitism, expelling birds, insects, and diverse terrestrial animals by giving the priority to ourselves. But what if our buildings could have a mutualistic relation with the environment they are been settled by not just integrating vegetation, but mimetizing systems found in trees?
Technological anatomy
To shelter animals and adapt to the urbanistic landscapes between different structures across a city, the Ikelos modules feature a soft robotic system divided into three specific parts: the base, the skin, and the skeleton.
The base is composed of an Arduino Nano integrated with a wifi system, a battery, and an air pressurizer that captures air and directs it to the branches. In addition, the three bases are connected in the middle of the air flux by a “Y” platform that allows the fitting of each base and the air channels to the building with suction cups behind it.
Along with sheltering living beings, other tree-inspired technologies were implemented in the project to adapt buildings for a more ecological and responsible alternative considering the urgency of climate change and the enhancement of high temperatures. Besides having reactive leaves to block sunlight emissions, the Ikelos modules integrate a transpiration system to cool down structures as an alternative to the usual AC systems consuming electricity.
Each module of the system constitutes a structure that can be attached to create a ventilation system around the building that captures air through specific holes as an air entrance to its interior. By entering the passages located on the top of the exoskeleton layer, which aims to protect its soft interior from external interferences, the air gets condensed through a generative layer with tiny pores that create humidity in its interior making buildings transpire as trees.
The skin, made of eggshell, has the objective of integrating small-sized creatures and vegetation with tiny pores that make it possible for the entry of insects and the application of seeds of small species of plants to adapt buildings that never had the purpose of bringing nature close. It’s divided into segments to provide flexibility to the soft robotic system inside and a structure that can cover and protect animals inside the branches.
The skeleton made of hydrogel provides better flexibility and less weight with six inflatable balls surrounded by a circular structure divided into five sections enabling different sizes and angles by gates controlled by heat inducers that manage the airflow through the channels deforming temporarily the material. At last, its structure provides six openings that can be used by medium-sized animals, such as bats, birds, and even rodents that would like to protect themselves from external conditions.
All the structure modules have a symmetrical and articulated shape in their center to facilitate their application in different buildings, from rounded to square ones. To possibilitate this articulation and protect its interior, as the entrance to the inside, the exoskeleton part has specific binding sections that contribute to the good performance of the air channels by preventing air leakage.
Human interaction
To connect with the modules the person, company, or institution that manages the building will access an app that can connect all the individual bases that manage each branch to configure its altitude and location to adapt them to the different necessities of the specific urbanistic context, as the amount of space available to be used.
By accessing the app, the user will be guided to inform the location where the modules are being settled to collect and analyze data automatically to adapt to the required necessities. However, in case the user notices something that doesn’t match the urban condition, needing specifically to change the branch distribution process, an option to configure an individual unit manually will be available.
