BioMat Department
The Department of Biobased Materials and Materials Cycles in Architecture (BioMat) ) is a new research group founded in 2016 in the ITKE (Institute for Structural Design and Design of the University of Stuttgart) – Faculty 1 Architecture and Urban Planning. BioMat has the goal to merge the fields of design, sustainable materials developments, biomimetics, spatial realization and smart systems in architecture. Teaching, research, materials development and fabrication as well as industrial projects are highly integrated.
One of our missions as architects and engineers at BioMat is to raise different sustainability aspects in architecture and to translate our ecological concerns in the form of newly developed sustainable smart materials and designed products in this respect. Function-oriented design methodologies, spatial configurations and bionic-derived structural forms, combined by deep material knowledge, digital fabrication and strong industrial cooperation form our main research strategies.
BioMat offers architectural students and industrial partners to directly cooperate in current researches in the scope of sustainable and smart building systems. The main goal is to integrate the new technologies of materials and building systems to help in shaping another perspective of the new sustainable architecture of the coming era.
Architects together with engineers have here the possibility to apply and develop different manufacturing and computer aided fabrication technologies to generate and realize the custom-designed products with the optimized structure. The applicable fabrication technologies vary between plastic compounding processing techniques, extrusion, thermoforming, casting techniques, FDM technologies and others to generate various innovative building systems.
Research fields at BioMat: Biomimetics, sustainability, development of new building materials, fabrication, ‘smart’ materials, fiber-reinforced composites, product design and multifunctional building systems.
