AN Italian-Filipino company advocating green architecture has designed houses and buildings that can cope with typhoons, floods and other calamities brought by climate change.

Italian architect Romolo V. Nati, Executive Chairman and CEO of ITPI (Italpinas Euroasian Design and Eco-Development Corporation (ITPI), has put presented his coral-inspired designs to encourage Filipinos to build typhoon and flood-adaptable shelters in the aftermath of destructive calamities sweeping the country.

“Our role model is nature and its ability to adapt to drastic changes in the environment,” Nati said of his design based on the Voronoi Diagram, a mathematical way of dividing space into regions or cells, a characteristic present in the structures of corals.

ITPI’s coral design bagged the “Special Energy Award,” besting 200 entries from 50 countries in the Design Against the Elements (DAtE) global competition in 2011 supported and co-sponsored by the National Geographic Society, the Climate Change Commission, and United Architects of the Philippines.

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Featured on Business Week Mindanao, 15 September 2013