Citing a company-wide responsibility to take sustainable design seriously, HOK, one of the world's largest architecture firms, announced yesterday that it had formed a partnership with the Biomimicry Guild to incorporate cutting-edge ideas from nature into HOK's designs for buildings, towns and cities.

The two companies will bring their respective expertises -- HOK in green buildings and sustainable design, the Guild in adapting natural technologies to human needs -- to bear on projects around the world, with the goal of lowering the overall impact of the built environment on the planet.

Recent studies have estimated that nearly half of the world's greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to building energy use and building materials, and as much as 75 percent of global energy use is needed to power buildings. As a result, greening the planet's buildings has become a key element of the design and architecture worlds.

"We have a responsibility to make sure that these buildings are responsible citizens," HOK's Mike Plotnick explained in a press conference yesterday. As a result, he said, the partnership will bring HOK to explore the intersections between buildings and sustainability, looking at every possible way of improving cities and buildings.

The partnership has already begun work on a project in India, and is exploring opportunities in the Middle East and North America. The India project is to design a series of villages in Lavasa, India, outside of Pune; over an area of 21 million square feet, HOK and the Biomimicry Guild will be able to test on a large scale some of the most forward-looking bio-inspired ideas.

Chip Crawford, director of HOK's planning group, explained one of the biggest challenges they face: the region receives between 21 and 27 feet of rain per year, concentrated during the three-month monsoon season. The region gets increasingly drier over the remaining nine months, so the projects at Lavasa will need to manage and maintain water levels in the area while minimizing erosion and topsoil loss.

As part of the project, HOK and the Guild will be working with "ecological performance standards" in mind. The goal of these standards is to ensure that the projects, once in place, match how the sites performed ecologically prior to any construction taking place.

The goal, according to Dayna Baumeister, the cofounder of the Biomimicry Guild, is "to move beyond just looking like nature to actually performing like nature."