Chimpanzee Nest

Apparantly chimps build nests in the canopies of trees. I did not know this. The above photo is of a chimp nest in the Kanyanchu Rainforest in Uganda.

During her observations of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, Jane Goodall discovered that each individual chimpanzee builds a fresh sleeping nest every night at dusk. Normally, this work takes no more than 3-5 minutes. The animal chooses a firm foundation in the crown of the tree, such as an upright fork or two horizontal branches. Then he reaches out and bends over smaller branches onto this foundation, keeping each one in place with his feet. Finally he tucks in the little leafy twigs growing around the rim of the nest and lies down, pressing the whole cushion down with his body. In some nests, she found evidence of complicated interweaving of branches notwithstanding the speed with which they were constructed.

Ha Jung, I thought about your monkey zoo when I read this. Also, the way you were peeling and overlapping pieces of your model to create spaces seems similar to this idea of nest building...

I myself would like to learn more about other instances where a living creature uses its own weight to inform the architecture. Like with my model, since I did not have string running the both ways across the volume, it leaned to one side. But once human force pulled the strings in opposite directions, it stood straight. What if dynamic forces altered architecture? Or architecture responded to varying conditions such as physical surroundings or human forces? Where can I see an example of that? I once saw a conceptual model of a structure built out of strips of material that hung off the edge of the land into the water. At high tide, the strips were pushed upwards into an arc and created a space below. At low tide, the strips descended with the water and laid flat. This meant that the space could only be occupied at high tide. Or another thing I think of is when Bill Gates designed his home so that when someone entered the room, the lights/temperature/music etc. changed depending on their personal tastes. But I am more interested in architecture that adapts to human or natural conditions as opposed to microchips and software.