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Buildings must adapt and respond dynamically to their environment to reduce their energy loads and mitigate environmental impacts. Several approaches have addressed responsive behavior in buildings, such as adaptive and biomimetic envelopes. However, biomimetic approaches lack sustainability consideration, as conducted in biomimicry approaches. This study provides a comprehensive review of biomimicry approaches to develop responsive envelopes, aiming to understand the connection between material selection and manufacturing. This review of the last five years of building construction and architecture-related studies consisted of a two-phase search query, including keywords that answered three research questions relating to the biomimicry and biomimetic-based building envelopes and their materials and manufacturing and excluding other non-related industrial sectors. The first phase focused on understanding biomimicry approaches implemented in building envelopes by reviewing the mechanisms, species, functions, strategies, materials, and morphology. The second concerned the case studies relating to biomimicry approaches and envelopes. Results highlighted that most of the existing responsive envelope characteristics are achievable with complex materials requiring manufacturing processes with no environmentally friendly techniques. Additive and controlled subtractive manufacturing processes may improve sustainability, but there is still some challenge to developing materials that fully adapt to large-scale and sustainability needs, leaving a significant gap in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought to a sudden halt most of the human social, economic and productive dynamics, causing, on the other hand, a rapid acceleration towards digital transformation in order to overcome the limits of physical presence. In this transformative context is inserted the contribution that aims to describe an experience of applied research to explore new possible models of communication for the fashion system in the digital world. Through the current climate of transformation, the project Metamorphic Fashion Design was born, which intends to reflect on the possible responses of the fashion industry in this new phase. Metamorphic Fashion Design is a new experiential multiverse in which new relationships have been formed between different disciplines such as Character Design, Game Design, Fashion Design, Interior Design, Performance Art and Sound Design. This project experience has opened to new reflections and new critical insights on how the digital properly declined can consolidate, more and more, as a means of new innovative trajectories throughout the fashion system. The project aims to propose a new form of communication for the excellence of fashion with the possibility of extending this experimentation to the made in Italy system.

Vertically aligned structures, which are a series of characteristic conformations with thickness-direction alignment, interconnection, or assembly of filler in polymeric composite materials that can provide remarkable structural performance and advanced anisotropic functions, have attracted considerable attention in recent years. The past two decades have witnessed extensive development with regard to universal fabrication methods, subtle control of morphological features, improvement of functional properties, and superior applications of vertically aligned structures in various fields. However, a systematic review remains to be attempted. The various configurations of vertical structures inspired from biological samples in nature, such as vertically aligned structures with honeycomb, reed, annual ring, radial, and lamellar configurations are summarized here. Additionally, relevant processing methods, which include the transformation of oriented direction, external-field inducement, template method, and 3D printing method, are discussed in detail. The diverse applications in mechanical, thermal, electric, dielectric, electromagnetic, water treatment, and energy fields are also highlighted by providing representative examples. Finally, future opportunities and prospects are listed to identify current issues and potential research directions. It is expected that perspectives on the vertically aligned structures presented here will contribute to the research on advanced multifunctional composites., (© 2021 Wiley-VCH GmbH.)