The Adrienne Roeder lab at the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology is contributing insights from plant biology to an interdisciplinary project to integrate green energy into architectural design.

Roeder, associate professor in the Weill Institute and School of Integrative Plant Science, Plant Biology Section, in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is collaborating with Jenny Sabin, professor of architecture and design tech in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, and Itai Cohen, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, to endow buildings with two traits from the plant kingdom: beauty and diurnal heliotropism, the ability of certain species to turn buds, leaves and other structures to follow the sun from dawn to dusk.

Led by Sabin, the project will design a bio-inspired façade, or “skin,” that will convert sunlight to electricity with mechanically tracking solar panels and change shape over the course of a day like a heliotropic plant to better capture solar energy.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the project a $650 thousand phase 1 grant through the NSF Convergence Accelerator, a program that accelerates emergent technologies from discovery to impact to address urgent and complex social and economic challenges.

Using 3D-imaging techniques pioneered by the Roeder lab, the project will examine cell-level growth patterns that drive heliotropism in Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress. Sabin will take insights from the patterns to optimize how the façade captures solar energy and to inspire the façade’s aesthetic design. To shift the shape and configuration of the façade, the collaboration will draw on kirigami, a Japanese paper art of cutting and folding that the Cohen lab has used in previous projects to create tiny self-folding machines and autonomous microbots.