BioWall

Woven walls with living plants, 2006

Launched at the NewBritishDesigners exhibition in Amsterdam with Droog Design.
Exhibited at HauteGREEN and InProduction.

Rick Flowerday

BioWall is a hand woven three-dimensional structure that can be crafted into lace-like walls of any dimension. Springy fiberglass rods are bowed into rings and woven into several dodecahedra that in turn are joined together. The woven fibres create a balance between the rigidity of sheet material and the flexibility of a textile. The structure is based on the principle of self-similarity enabling it to work from the nano to the macro scale. It can be seen in our natural environment in the formation of bubbles, living cells and water molecules.

With plants creeping and crawling around the structure, BioWall can become an indoor, living hedge that divides space. By observing the behaviour of plants many farmers can predict and understand the changing weather patterns. As it becomes increasingly difficult to read the signs of our natural environment in urban, built landscapes we use plants in our work as we consider them to be the most sophisticated of sensors and displays.

We use technology to try to reintroduce these ideas by creating reactive surfaces inspired by botanical life that reflect and communicate environmental changes.

BlumenWallpaper next to BioWall as seen at NewBritishDesigners, Amsterdam 2006

More information on the inspiration for and the geometry behind BioWall can be found in our research & development web under BioWall.

The Droog Design exhibition was sponsored by Central Saint Martins, London, where Rachel Wingfield is a Research Fellow

• http://www.csm.arts.ac.uk/

Many thanks to Georgios Daratzis and Sateen Panagiotopoulou for their help in making the first BioWall!

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