Drawing inspiration from plants and their astonishing capabilities to address issues concerning architecture, urban planning and materials: this is the concept around which In Situ Lab, a start-up housed in the ENS Lyon incubator, has been built.

Using phyllotaxis to design sustainable buildings

Founded by Nicolas Vernoux-Thélot, architect, and Teva Vernoux, a doctor in plant biology who works at the RDP laboratory, In Situ Lab is a consultancy specializing in the research and development of innovations based on biomimicry, with a view to sustainable architectural and urban design.

"It's all about using the principles of plant architecture, what we call phyllotaxis: the geometry of the distribution of structures along the growth axis," explains Teva Vernoux. "Plants are all built with an axis, leaves and/or flowers, and many follow spirals around this axis. We are using the geometry of spiral phyllotaxis to propose solutions, whether in terms of building design or land use, to achieve sufficient levels of exposure to light and sun, both to benefit from passive heating and for reasons of well-being".

“Green Alternatives 2”: supporting innovation in the ecological transition of cultural players

It was in this context that the start-up In Situ Lab embarked on the Up-BiB project, in association with the RDP laboratory at ENS de Lyon and the Alkante company. The three partners won the “Alternatives vertes 2” award, a call for projects designed to support innovation in the ecological transition of cultural players. This call for projects is managed by the Banque des Territoires on behalf of the French government, in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Ecological Transition, Energy, Climate and Risk Prevention, and the General Secretariat for Investment (France 2030 fund).

"The principle of this call for projects was to propose solutions for the ecological transition in the world of culture, which includes architecture. As In Situ Lab works in particular on architectural and urban planning issues, we were right on target," comments Teva Vernoux.

UP-BiB, self-generating building template software for urban planning professionals

In concrete terms, the UP-BiB project is based on the development of an application that will enable urban planning professionals, and more specifically public bodies, to study the energy-saving potential of a plot of land in advance.

We started off very empirically and developed a software program that works quite simply," explains Teva Vernoux. The general principle, for a given plot of land, is to choose a position for a first building template and use a spiral to decide on the position of subsequent ones, in the same way as you would produce leaves one after the other. Using data on the sun's path through the year, we can calculate exposures for each new template. And we decide on a threshold, saying, for example, that we want 50% direct exposure. If the chosen positioning doesn't meet this target, we eliminate it and move on to another. If it does, we select it. And so on. Thanks to these models, we can then propose sets of ground plans, which the architect and urban planner can work with, upstream of construction".

The funding obtained through the “Green Alternatives 2” call for projects will thus enable each of the three players involved - In Situ Lab, RDP and Alkante - to continue moving forward, each in their own field: RDP more on the research side, In Situ and Alkante on software development management and deployment. “Knowing that the technological solutions are really provided by Alkante in terms of software engineering and choice of deployment models, even if these aspects will be managed globally within the consortium,” adds Teva Vernoux.

Next step: develop the business model and make the tool available to experts 

The next steps will involve developing the software architecture, so that the application can be made available to customers, as well as observing market trends and thinking about the business model.

What we hope to have at the end of the day is a product that can be marketed, with the main aim of getting the software used, because there are significant energy savings to be made, with solutions that in the end are relatively simple, robust and low-cost," explains Teva Vernoux. In this sense, our project is to build a community of users who will be able to use it, who will pay for advice on its use rather than access to the software itself... but everything remains to be thought out at this level. The first users will be communities of communes and all public structures, rather than private individuals".