BIOARCHITECTURE
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
The Future is Now – A Letter to Arup by Rachel Armstrong | This Big City
Response to The Under-imagined Future of Transport by Susan Claris I don’t agree that the importance of forward-thinking long term planning is over sold! What I do think is over-sold – is the productisation of very specific solutions to challenges that are not well characterised and we don’t yet know how to face. The current economic & political system only deals with short term-ism (returns and period in office) so investment in research and development that deals with decade or more kinds of solutions does not exist to properly support the strategic development of implementable solutions. In other words, realistic future solutions are ‘evolved’ not ‘born’.
Description: That Which Lives In Me is an installation that uses Augmented Reality technologies to enable dynamic rearrangement of real and virtual spaces. Drawing on the metaphor of a snail’s “shell house”, they have “augmented” real shells of Achatina fulica giant African snails with a certain analogue of “electronic aura” – an interactive layer of digital visual information. This information is output to the screen in real time, its appearance determined by behaviour of the snails: the dynamics of their movements inside the terrarium and the intensity of their inter-communication.
Responsive Architecture
London (CNN) -- What if buildings had lungs that could absorb carbon emissions from the city and convert them into something useful? What if they had skin that could control their temperature without the need for radiators or air-conditioning? What if buildings could come "alive?"
'Living' buildings could inhale city carbon emissions - CNN.com
Creating 'Living' Buildings
ScienceDaily (Nov. 5, 2010) — The University of Greenwich's School of Architecture & Construction is poised to use ethical synthetic biology to create 'living' materials that could be used to clad buildings and help combat the effects of climate change. Researchers from the University of Greenwich are collaborating with others at the University of Southern Denmark, University of Glasgow and University College London (UCL) to develop materials that could eventually produce water in desert environments or harvest sunlight to produce biofuels. In collaboration with an architectural practice and a building materials' manufacturer, the idea is to use protocells -- bubbles of oil in an aqueous fluid sensitive to light or different chemicals -- to fix carbon from the atmosphere or to create a coral-like skin, which could protect buildings.
Association for Robots in Architecture -
ROB|ARCH has been initiated by the Association for Robots in Architecture as a new conference series on the use of robotic fabrication in architecture, art, and design, closely linking industry with cutting-edge research institutions. For the first time, ROB|ARCH 2012 will bring together international university partners who will open their robotic research labs to a creative use and present an insight in their applied robotic research at various locations throughout Europe. While the international workshops will be distributed at university partners, the following conference will take place in Vienna, a city well known for its living quality, but also a hotspot for technology and innovation. The internationally renowned publishing house Springer Wien/New York will publish and market the proceedings of the conference worldwide with the following topics: We invite authors to submit papers with original research relating to the use of robots in architecture, art, and design.By Rachel Armstrong Between the 1830’s to 1840’s, the modern public health movement was started in Britain when Edwin Chadwick, advocate for the Poor Law, brought his vision of public health through sanitarianism into being through public works. This ultimately resulted in the construction of modern day water and sewage systems that set standards of urban infrastructure throughout the developed world. Today we are facing a similar urban crisis of environment due to the consequences of living in industrial pollution for the last 150 years.
Metabolic Materials as a Measure of Architectural Quality |
“So no, I don’t accept that the future is over-sold : it’s productised an as a result it’s over constrained by our current ways of thinking and immediate practices …” - Rachel Armstrong, letter to ARUP Have you ever wondered how a single cell can finally transform in a complex organism?