Why are you showing me an image of a greenhouse? It’s a house, but a different shade of green. And it’s not for growing in the way you’d think. Huh? I will explain.

Perhaps a good reason to start pushing for software vendors to get animation of building components into their BIM or CAD applications, besides the cool factor, is this notion of biomimicry. Autodesk has formed a mini-web dedicated to the topic, which seems to have slipped by unnoticed. The concept is wonderful. Why not use nature as inpiration to build buildings that add to, rather than take away from their environment. Is sustainability simply just getting to a balance on the tipping point to success or failure? What has been gnawing away at the gut of BIM is the ability to design and simulate the design features in-place. It’s no fun to pull the design into Max and start adding “ik” controls just to understand the impact of an operable feature. Concurrent design and analysis becomes critical in the AEC world as designers become more sophisticated about the questions they ask their software to answer. Much like an industrial designer can test out moving parts of a machine with Inventor, architects should have the same level of sophistation in their own tools. Perhaps we are soo good at borrowing without complaint, that we are a good target for ‘upselling’. Don’t give us your laundry list of things that might do the job, let’s get the tools to do what we want internally, to avoid the asynchronous nature of exporting and importing peices and parts of a moving puzzle. Oh, yeah… so back to our little green, er red house.

So here, I present the house of the week – yes, it’s the same view as above. Then where did all that glass go? Why, it’s underneath the sliding roof form. Cool. Why? Be patient, and I’ll explain.

While not necessarily an example of biomimicry, this house certainly has the ability to react to it’s environment. When the living room is too sunny, slide some shade over the patio, change the view… it opens up some very interesting possibilities. Click through to see the whole progression.

Sliding House by dRMM – via Dezeen.