Living Buildings

By Rachel Armstrong

Living Technology offers powerful new materials, tools and methods of assembly for the built environment. The application of Living Technology to architectural practice results in the genesis of Living Buildings. This new approach to the built environment changes the way that we think about and engage with issues of sustainability.

Living Buildings are enabled by the creation of Metabolic Materials, which are substrates that are directly engage in energetic exchanges with nature so that architecture actually becomes part of the biosphere and is not separate from it. In the same way that biological systems respond to changes in the environment through their metabolic pathways, Living Buildings are also able to respond to environmental changes through their metabolic materials since the outcomes of these couplings with the natural world result in chemical changes with observable effects such as growth, colour change, differentiation or movement. In this way, Living Buildings possess some of the properties of living systems and may be thought of as being ‘alive’.

This new approach to the built environment changes the way in which we think about and engage with issues of sustainability. The current model of sustainability within the practice of the built environment is based on twentieth century technologies and manufacturing processes that are centralized, mechanised, resource-hungry and produce homogenous inert materials. Consequently these methods effectively strip the natural world of its resources at a much faster rate than it is possible to replace them. In order to reduce the toxicity of these processes to the environment our current approach to sustainable architectural practice is to effectively insulate human activity from the natural world, or at the very least limit the amount of energy used in building practice. This approach is also not sustainable as a longer-term solution to urban sustainability, since humans need to consume natural resources in order to survive.

A new approach to sustainability is therefore required that acknowledges that humans must consume resources for survival and which is able to engage directly in an exchange of energy with the natural world so that it is environmentally responsive. Neil Spiller’s AVATAR (Advanced Virtual And Technological Architectural Research) group is conducting scientific experiments with functional and design outcomes into the production of Metabolic Materials in order to explore the possibility of a new way of thinking about sustainable architectural practice by collaborating with international scientists who are leaders in their respective fields that are derived from Synthetic Biology, Complex Chemistry and Origins of Life Sciences. Uniquely, these architectures are grown from their fundamental components rather than being assembled by following an architectural blueprint that constitutes a bottom-up approach to architectural practice.

Chemist Martin Hanczyc and architect Christian Kerrigan from Neil Spiller’s AVATAR group are investigating the applications of protocell technology in an architectural context. Protocells are the precursors of synthetic cells based on lipid chemistry as the containers for a number of species of different metabolisms, provides an opportunity to generate Metabolic Materials with ‘unnatural’ properties such as being able to remove toxins or nanoparticles from the environment and process them into safer substances. Current research into the architectural properties of the protocells is at an experimental laboratory stage of development and experiments are ongoing to investigate the ability of the protocells to produce a solid precipitate, to solve a complex environment and to produce an autonomously generated sculpture. The work is at an early stage of development but protocells are envisaged to have a large range of potential applications in the built environment from protective paints that are able to replenish in UV light, to the production of carbon-dioxide fixing rock that could heal damaged coral reefs and provide environmental ‘immune systems’ that are able to clean up contaminated sites.

Metabolic Materials raise ethical, cultural and social questions that are ideally placed for public engagement in an architectural context owing to its focus on human issues and its innate interdisciplinarity spanning disciplines such as town planning, engineering, history and critical theory and design. The existence of these materials will require us to think differently about the potential of our cities where every possible surface could contribute to improving the environmental health of the metropolis, filter pollutants, augment urban spaces and have a life cycle where non-functional Living Buildings may decay and be recycled when hey are no longer in use. In reality we are likely to see a gradual transition from twentieth century processes to twenty first century approaches through the development of self-regenerating surface protectants, hybrid metabolic materials where living systems such as bacteria are structurally supported and nurtured using traditional building materials such as sandstone, the development of artificial ecologies where Living Buildings work together to achieve an outcome and finally, the possibility of Living Cities will emerge that will be as varied in their forms and metabolism as we currently see in nature.

www.avatarlondon.org

Dr Rachel Armstrong “The best way to predict the future is to design it”—Buckminister Fuller http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/people/A_armstrong_rachel.htm