Biomimicry in Architecture. Mitchell Joachim: Don't build your home, grow it! The Future is Now – A Letter to Arup by Rachel Armstrong. This post is also available in: Chinese (Traditional) 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’. In fact, the future is very poorly invested in and governments are currently slashing funding for basic science which underpins technological and economic developments. As for the issue of under-imagining, I don’t think that there is a crisis in this capacity at all! Dr. Responsive Architecture. 'Living' buildings could inhale city carbon emissions. A graphical representation of London's "living" skyline as envisaged by award-winning architect Richard Hyams.
Over the next 40 years, "living" buildings could absorb carbon emitted from the city Synthetic biology enables scientists to create life-like matter in the labKnown as "protocells," these chemicals could be applied to buildings in the form of paintOther chemicals will let buildings regulate their own temperature and produce own power 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? " Science fiction? "Not as such," claims Dr Rachel Armstrong, senior TED fellow and co-director of Avatar, a research group exploring the potential of advanced technologies in architecture. A drawing of protocells reacting with carbon to produce artificial limestone shells. Creating 'Living' Buildings. 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. ''We want to use ethical synthetic biology to create large-scale, real world applications for buildings,'' he says.
Association for Robots in Architecture - Metabolic Materials as a Measure of Architectural Quality | 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. This crisis, like the situation in the 1830’s, is directly related to our development and predilection for cities, which is only set to increase.
Since the industrial revolution we have established a new relationship with technology that has prioritized the industrial landscape over the natural environment, leading to a toxic relationship between human activity and the land. Architecture is a technology of environments. References: KERB 19 / Paradigms of Nature: Postnatural Futures. “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? And how the survival of this organism depends on the key relations set with its species and the environment.
The same questions could be applied when talking about our cities. But what if we perceive humankind and its manifestations as part of nature? The traditional one-way dependency on technology and machines is presented here as a reciprocal, way to understand the new paradigm of landscape, architecture, and design.
Buildings approaching the forms of mountains and caverns; structures that appear as rivers and clouds: the contemporary architects producing these conditions advance an agenda that we can provisionally term the “architectural reconstruction of nature.” Dr. You can buy and read KERB 19.