May The Forest Be With You: Leveraging The Power Of Ecology In Computational Design And Biomimicry

Image of The Three Sisters: Corn, Beans and Squash

As the last leaves of autumn trade their greens for hues of red, yellow, and orange and fall gently to the forest floor, look closely. A transformative process is taking place. It is the culmination of decades of succession. The change we see before us is a cycle of nutrient accumulation and deposition; the building of healthy soil toward the establishment of an efficient and thriving community of plants enveloped within the forest canopy. 

A forest ecosystem represents the final stage of succession. Succession begins with bare earth, an ideal place for pioneer plants, that send deep taproots earthward, mining for nutrients and opening the soil to oxygen and water. Over several seasons, as these pioneers fall over and die, their leaves and stalks provide the biomass that fuels the building of topsoil and the movement of shallow-rooted grasses and meadow flowers into this place. The thick root mass of these shallow-rooted plants exponentially increases the biomass, and nutrient-cycling is accelerated until we begin to see the establishment of herbaceous shrubs and eventually sun-loving, and later shade-tolerant trees.  

In short, the forest is not a static place; the forest moves. It is self-regulating, adapting to changes as they come. And the more complex the network of flora, fauna, and fungi within this system, the smaller the feedback loops, and the more adaptable the system is to change. Built-in redundancies and mutualistic relationships between species and varieties makes for a resilient system that cycles a comparatively small amount of macro- and micro-nutrients over its conventional counterpart. This is what makes the forest ecosystem such a valuable model for ecological design, especially in an era facing the instability brought about by a changing climate. 

Modeling landscape design after the forest ecosystem focuses on these natural cycles, with each element contained within contributing to the whole; providing avenues for soil-building and nutrient-cycling, moisture retention, temperature regulation, pollination, structural support, habitats, and more. 

Conventional horticultural and agricultural systems unfortunately segregate plants, but if the forest ecosystem teaches us anything, it’s that plants work best in communities. These designs might be as simple as incorporating the multi-storied layers found in the forest ecosystem or as complicated as examining how each element of one plant impacts another while also considering substrate and external factors like wind and sun exposure. 

A successful ecological design produces multifaceted yields in the areas of food, fertilizer, fuel, fiber, and/or (f)armaceuticals. It will also incorporate plants that serve various functions to support the whole system. These include insectary, dynamic-accumulating, and nitrogen-fixing plants to support pollination and nutrient-cycling, ground covers or broad-leafed plants for soil moisture and temperature regulation and to suppress unwanted growth, and plants that provide habitat to beneficial insects. It also focuses on tolerances to external factors like sun and wind exposure. 

We see elements of this by indigenous cultures in the Americas with the planting of the “three sisters guild,” made up of corn, a vining legume, and squash. These are food-producing plants, but they also serve additional functions. The shallow-rooted corn is protected by the broad-leafed squash with rainfall directed toward the roots of all three plants and the leaves preventing significant temperature differentials during day and night cycles. These broad leaves also maintain moisture in the soil, protecting the roots of the corn from wind and sun exposure. The corn offers a trellis to the legume which in turn harbors nitrogen-fixing bacteria, transforming atmospheric nitrogen into nitrogen available to the corn and squash. It is a simple, mutualistic relationship involving just three plants that yields a greater caloric and protein output per acre than a monoculture alone.

A more complex ecological design is enveloped within the cultural and ecological landscape, drawing on the overarching support each system provides. While design used to be segregated by project, today architects are integrating design that not only plugs into the native ecology, but tells the story of place. 

The advent of computational and parametric design has made it possible to draw from the complex, relational datasets describing the various functions within an ecosystem so that the designer can focus on the aesthetics without sacrificing the benefits inherent in an ecological design. These data sets might contain information about how a plant not only relates to its environment (soil type, water- and sun-tolerances, slope, etc.), but also how it relates to other plants. As changes are made to a design, plants best-suited to that specific environment are automatically populated into the space.  

Computational design leverages the exceptional qualities of the forest ecosystem toward building a landscape that is not only functional and largely self-regulating, but also beautiful.