Video production good morning everybody. Thank you for having me here. I would like to share this morning some insights I have learned into my research and geometry and form towards more than human thermal comfort. I’m a doctoral researcher at the University of Stuttgart inside the excellence cluster of computational design for architecture. And I won’t go deep so much into modeling strategies, but into the applications and what I have found out.

0:52 And I would like to bring your attention for a moment towards the more than human inhabitants of our built environment. Because we tend to think that cities are inhabited by people, just by by us, but actually we coexist with a plethora of microorganisms to bigger wildlife. And all those actors play a really key and important role in supporting even our own health. So, there is a saying that there is no something more anthropocentric than being non-anthropocentric because our well-being is really reliant into the more than human entities of the built environment.

1:36 And within Oh. Sorry. Within that framework, why is not working? Within that framework, I would like to launch into another reality that we face, climate change. Climate change is a threat, but it’s not a threat only for us. It’s a threat for all these species that exist especially in the real environment. And its influence it’s so broad that affects from populations until the genes. So, we are in this point in history where this threat is pushing us towards evolution to adapt.

2:17 And remember this because I will come back later. And among all these species that inhabit the real environment, I focus into the bees. And probably more important than introduce myself is to introduce to this guy here. Because when we think about bees, we tend to think about honey, the honey bees. But that was that what I thought when I started to work with these animals years ago.

2:50 I thought that the honey bee was the only one and by researching a little bit more, I found out that we have among 20,000 species of bees worldwide. And that the honey bees is are only eight species. That means that 0.1% of biodiversity of bees is the honey bee. And I heard once that if we talk about bee conservation and we talk about the honey bee, it would be like talking about bird conservation and go out and say, “Let’s save the chickens.” So, I focused into the wild bees in this research, especially in the cavity nesting wild bees.

3:31 And I need to introduce you to their life cycle because maybe not all of you are familiar with it. These are species that has a yearly cycle, sometimes two years, two times for a per year. And what happens is that in early spring they emerge, they forage, and by doing that they pollinate. By the way, they are around 200 times more efficient than a honey bee in pollinating.

3:56 Then, they find a cavity where they lay an egg. They make a very nice ball of pollen and nectar and seal this cell and go to the next one and go to the next one. Then, the mother dies and the babies stay in the cavities where they go from egg to larva to pupa and hibernate as adults until the next spring. As an example of conservation in the built environment, we tend to put these devices because these not only needs foraging resources foraging resources, the plant diversity is very very much important, but they need also nesting devices.

4:39 And we tend to come to these solutions that have little evaluation of their performance and in their real functionality of supporting the health of the the wild bees. But, why bees? First of all, I am not bringing these to the city. These have been here before dinosaurs. And they are a very important actor in the eco in the ecosystem because they are like living sensors. Their presence really tell us how the is the habitat quality and how is the ecological connectivity in the cities.

5:20 An ecological connectivity is an important characteristic that I will talk a little bit later. And these they are important because they maintain plant diversity with and with plant diversity, they help other insects which are food for birds which supports other bigger wildlife. So, they are these very key important elements. And ecological connectivity is super important because remember this one a minute ago. When we tend to design the ecological fabric, the green infrastructure of the cities, these tend to be like the spots, parks, isolated.

6:03 And the migration of the species among these spots it’s very difficult. And with no migration of the species, we decrease the genetic diversity. And genetic diversity is what allowed us to evolve to changes. So, we are in this reality of being forced to evolve due to climate change. And within the cities, some species cannot because they cannot migrate and enrich their genetic diversity. So, I started to think about what is the continuous interface that we have in the city.

6:41 What is this a skin? And I seek out my attention to the urban surfaces. Urban surfaces is this cultivated tissue that we have everywhere, but during summer they can reach really, really, really hot temperatures. And it’s really a threat to us. The urban surface is the real interface between the human and space and the outdoor space. It’s what regulates our microclimate. It’s materiality, its geometry. It’s what mandates how much of the radiation that we receive every day is really staying with us.

7:15 So, during summer, this is these are some thermal images about the Stuttgart during summer. And it could reach really peak temperatures. And if for us, humans, it is a threat, imagine for a little bee trying to lay an egg or trying to migrate in this reality. There is an important stage in their life cycle where they are super vulnerable and it’s when they are a larva and a pupa.

7:48 And the mother is not there because they are not a colony, they are solitary bees. And there is a lot of experiments in biology about thermal treatments that shows that over 30° exposure of the larva to it causes some metabolic stress. The metabolic stress could be from the adults that emerge are less efficient to forage and reproduce. And over 40° C, there’s high mortality. So, I started to wonder what happens because these bees are able to choose a very hot spot during spring because they are ectotherm, they need the energy of the sun to function.

8:31 But what they don’t know is that when they are not more they are not around anymore, this really hot spot can get really really hotter due to phenomena like the heat waves and the urban heat island effect. So, from this gap, florists and architecture very little concern about more than humans envelope design, especially when it comes to nesting devices also there is an ecological architectural gap. There’s a lot of experiments of thermal treatments of various species, so we we kind of know what happens when what happen with climate change.

9:10 But that’s like that architecture is a gap. And there is a little understanding of materiality and data about what happens at the level of the nesting tube of the bee. So, I started to think why not to design a kind of porous layer that we could place in a system building environment, not in all over but in certain spots would regulate temperature and also maybe provide a habitat for other species.

13:36 So, I I started to work with porous structures because of its heat thermal behavior. In a solid body, you have heat conduction and that’s it. When there are pores integrated in a solid body, that’s a heat transmission changes. It’s a delay. But when those pores are connected, there is convection playing a role there. Convection is the air going through and then and therefore taking out heat. It’s like when you are in the summer and you receive the breeze, you feel like the heat is taken off from you.

It’s the same principle. So, I started to work with geometries with interconnecting pores and also I started to understand how the tuning of the pores it’s how it’s influencing this behavior. Pores that are smaller than 5 mm that’s not allowed for convection. So, the convection can be neglected. But if the pores are tuned to create turbulence, this kind of taking out the heat around the nesting area could be applied.

So, I started wondering wondering if that is possible. If a geometry controlled porous structure could actually have any influence in the nesting tube as a surrounding geometry. How different pores geometries act and how can I refine the geometries to a passive cooling strategy because geometry by itself won’t collapse, well, just not retain heat. And what does the bees think about it? So, I started to test some TPMS and ADMS around the nesting tubes and benchmark it with red stem nesting aid.

That is the most common nesting aid. And I start to understand the heat retention. There in the corner you see the traditional nesting aid versus the porous cellular structure nesting aid. And I tested on the field during one summer and I found out that they don’t retain the heat. But it’s still not be so safe because as I told you the geometry won’t collapse itself. So, I came across this nice research that for the first time they could record this behavior on the honeybee.

The honeybee is collecting water in drops around the nesting area and they do so when there is a heat wave. We we we tend to think that they just find some air inside the colony, but no, they also collect droplets around it to tune the climate around the the brood cells so they don’t overheat and they develop safely. So, I came back to the porous structure and return return that to have this drop collection system in combination with the convection and the tortuosity to try to control the microclimate at the level of the nesting tube integrated into a facade element.

I started with the small samples because I didn’t know how the effect would be and I I I went for set testing it on field cuz climate is super complex. The bee behavior is super complex. So, try to simulate that at that point wasn’t enough for me a good idea. So, I I found out that the effect the cooling effect that you can have by droplet retention is this line.

13:44 So, it’s always under any threshold of the development of the bees. I benchmarked also with other materials that traditionally are used for nesting devices and always the same behavior. So, I decided to go a little bit bigger and design these two panels, one with water provision and one dry control to set it into a building and track for a for during the summer and understand what is happening at the level of the microclimate of the nesting tube.

14:25 I don’t know if you And the result were consistent. The water provide provided a sample keep a lower temperature not over passing high risk. And I was thinking, well, this setting is very specific. It was installed in a lot of a building in Stuttgart, but that’s not what you usually find. So, a further testing into a climatic chamber was made to understand if their use in other settings of buildings would be possible.

15:01 And yes, across all the experiments, I had a delta of 8.6 to 10 Kelvins of difference. So, it was I did it. And most important, the the water provides nest, it’s keep under the the 40° threshold that it’s the one that is related with high mortality of the bees. Then I needed to know what the bees think about these geometries because if they don’t understand, if they don’t use it, the color, the materiality.

15:37 I was using a wood composite for 3D printing this this nesting. So I needed to know whether they like or not because I had before and they are very picky when it comes to geometry and to and to smell and to material. They are very sensitive. So I designed these small probes and I distributed 19 of these in in a Stuttgart and looked at them for a whole year.

16:11 And this is a trend of their activities depending on the nesting and the foraging resources. Well, we said before about the plant diversity. It’s very It has a very important influence. For example, when there are vegetable gardens around, so more diversity of plants, there were more diversity and more number of of bees versus low diversity of plants. These are some data about the occupation. So I was testing like as I told you like different materials, also the viability of nesting tubes.

16:45 We tend to think that maybe we put more tubes into the nesting aids, we will be more successful, but that density of tubes could be negative because it could be unfavorable for us. It is when so on. So I found out that putting more tubes doesn’t mean that the nest is more successful or more occupied, for example. Then I examined the species. You can know kind know what a species inhabited the nesting tube by seeing the ceiling materials of the use clay for example and how if the clay is soft if the clay is road and it could be a different species.

17:26 So across my samples I found out this forest species of wild bees that are very much common in the area is I studied. And there I found more diverse of the species I repeat where I found more diverse of foraging resources. And the last analysis is the emerge. And that you can attract bees they could nest they could like the nest but is the nest safe enough so the babies can develop and born again.

17:58 So this year I have emergence so I have baby bees going out from my samples and they are super cute. And oh that’s which means if you want to go a little bit different what I’ve been doing I have the publication about on this regard. And Thank you very much for having me. Really I take with me a lot of insights of all of your wonderful work and a little explosion of ideas of how could I integrate it to this.

18:35 That is my email. Feel free to contact me if you would like to experiment with this as well. Thank you very much. To learn more about the CDFAM Computational Design Symposium, access the archive of previous presentations, interviews with speakers, and information about future events around the world, visit CDFAM.com.