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Architecture has had a long-standing and deeply intricate relationship with nature.
Since the Vitruvian man, architects have looked at the natural environment not
only as a source of inspiration but also as the ultimate term of reference to position
themselves within the cosmos. More recently, the wave of digitally-driven designs
has continued to turn to nature for inspiration, resulting in extravagant biomorphic
buildings. The latest instalment of this long discourse takes the conversation to
what is perhaps its logical next step: in Living Architecture Rachel Amstrong calls
for an unmediated connection between the two fields, one in which architecture
literally behaves like nature; that is, in which buildings will be able to grow, adapt
and mutate just like plants do.
This book would perhaps have sat well in Bruce Mau’s exhibition Massive
Change in which the Canadian designer argued through a number of case studies
that the meaning of the word ‘design’ needed to be radically rethought. Design
was no longer to be understood as the external, final layer to add to products once
all economic and cultural decisions about it had been taken, but rather it was going
to mutate into a more fundamental and holistic discipline concerned with
products’ very essence: the design of their DNA, both in literal and metaphorical
terms.
It is thus unsurprising that Living Architecture has been released in the form of an
e-book by the prestigious TED organisation. Its subject not only sits well with
TED’s own challenge to ask speakers ‘to give the talk of their lives’ but it also
uses this more agile medium to directly communicate in an economical and
potentially viral manner.
As I was reading the book on my Kindle, one of the screensavers that kept
randomly popping up showed plans and elevations of Palladio’s Villa Rotonda.
What initially appeared as a strange coincidence slowly became a contrapuntal
rhythm to Armstrong’s rhetoric; the symmetrical plans of Palladio’s villas for
Venetian merchants created a contrasting argument to the book’s. In Living
Architecture, the author feels the need and urgency to explain in great detail what
living matter is and how it will affect the built environment; architecture, on the
other hand, is used as a term of reference whose meaning has somehow been
stabilised by its own longevity and thus can be assumed without further
specification.
You can sense that much of the battle Armstrong has been engaging in over the
past years has to do with convincing various audiences that her ideas will not only
improve our lives but also that they will soon be feasible. This preoccupation
slowly takes over the main narrative of the book, unleashing a wide range of
precise and accessible definitions, examples and references to establish a robust
conceptual armature around the notion of living matter. As a result, the vocabulary
used to describe the science behind bio-synthetic structures is surgical and
convincing, whereas descriptions of their application to the built environment lack
equal clarity, casually interchanging distinct terms such as architecture, structure
and building.
It emerges that the main issue with the notion of living architecture is not so much
with the former but rather the latter term: architecture in fact differs from structure
or simply construction as it is often defined as ‘built thought’; that is, architecture
has always been able to digest external inputs − such as new technologies − to
eventually imagine and construct new architectural languages and modes of
inhabitation. On the other hand, Living Architecture too often resembles a
catalogue of sophisticated materials and pioneering solutions to implement,
without developing a parallel design culture or methodology to grasp how these
technologies would change our definition of architecture.
The challenge of a truly ecological construction and material culture has definitely
been pushed forward by Living Architecture; what is now perhaps needed is an
operating manual for it, a sort of Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture able to
alter the way we will design and inhabit living structures.