FIU: Festival of the Trees
We participated in this year’s Festival of the Trees, a fundraising event coordinated by Florida International University’s Interior Architecture Department and its advisory board. Each year South Florida’s architecture and design community demonstrates its support for quality interior architecture education through their annual participation in the Festival of the Trees (FOT) event and auction.
Biomimicry is an architectural typology that Miami will need to adopt in the near future in order to adapt to challenging climate conditions such as rising sea levels.
Studying our local flora may be the answer. We are proposing a conceptual solution on how buildings could thrive in the future by taking inspiration from the Florida’s red mangrove. The mangrove attaches its root to the soil underwater and extends to an upper root system over the water, which then flourishes to a structure of foliage.
Our “tree” sculpture mimics this system to symbolically create a new South Florida archetype divided into four parts: The first part of the sculpture begins at “The pedestal” which represents the existing buildings in Miami submerged underwater in the future. The second part uses white plastic pipes to symbolize “The Roots” which uses the pedestal as support. The third part is “The Water,” a clear acrylic that represents the future water level that will surpass the existing structures (pedestal). The final part is “The Light Box”. This represents architecture of the future – a white canvas of endless ideas that could exist in the mangrove city.
The plastic material represents how we can reuse the plastic waste to our benefit in the future.
