Responsive Architecture - Living systems

Last Week I had the pleasure of attending two lectures regarding Philip Beesley's Hylozoic soil Installation at Riverside Design Gallery in Cambridge ON (but also in Salt Lake city, and last years Venice biennale). The Sculpture is elegant and wonderful to experience yet at the same time it is unsettling and surreal. I think that as an art piece, as an interactive installation, it is utterly fantastic, absolutely awesome and the collaborative model that is used to design, imagine, build, and expand the work is extraordinary. The nature of the design relationships that Philip has and maintains with his respective partners is what enables the high caliber quality of the work that the group continues to produce. But I don’t want to comment on the work as an art piece instead I want to reflect on the ideas and goals behind the work that are responsible for its higher meaning

During the lecture Philip and his colleges discussed the work as creating a synthetic life, a new emergent system and a living architecture, he described the space created as a fertile, nurturing installation, where the visitors experience is similar to that of walking through a great forest. The ultimate goals of the research and the installation is to find a way to grow a living, responsive architecture that can generate a symbiotic relationship with the user, all this in order to find a delicate sustainable equilibrium within nature.

This is when I begin to question the goals itself, the creating of a living, responsive architecture. Firstly, our technology continues to be our new nature, continuously disconnecting us from the nature we all ready have, so the creation of a new system of nature (through science, design, biology and technology) we would again disconnect ourselves from the nature we are ultimately to preserve, protect and nurture.

Levels of responsive architecture already exists, Climate control is the first step, a machine in the basement that automatically adjusts the temperature regardless of which windows you forgot to close. So a more responsive architecture would only work to make our relationship with nature even more obscure. The creation of a synthetic forest (Plastic fronds, leaves, cellular structures + emergent behaviors through the used of programmed responses) would only work to supplant the actual experience of walking in the forest. The effort and construction of a synthetic forest only works to devalue the real thing letting us believe that I would be possible to make that nature ourselves. Looking back to our primitive beginnings through an architectural lens we see a vernacular architecture that was a nurturing, responsive, and resilient. Tree canopies provided us with shelter, security, nutrition, and above all a connection, respect, and reverence of the natural world.

I know there is no going back to living in the trees, and seeming the only way out this mess of technological dependence is through further technological explorations. But I would like to offer a counter point to this seemingly unavoidable destiny and that is the idea and value of human participation and human input.

During the first lecture Racheal Armstrong talked briefly about wanting to discover a way in which we as humans are not purely extracting energy life from nature, but instead we are working with it, as part of it, working for a mutually beneficial relationship with it. One of the key words That Racheal said for me was work. Opening your own window when it is hot for a breeze is work, using your lawn for a garden is work, walking to the store and carrying your goods on you back is work, mending your own socks is work, knitting your own hat is work, raising and cooking your own food is work, repairing your tools, your house, your stuff, is all work and it is good for you and all of this work raises your interaction with your stuff, your architecture, your home and your environment. It raises your knowledge of those things, and it requires your participation. Only in this active participation with your own things, your surrounding environment, landscapes, and city can lead to a sustainable architecture and a meaningful relationship with nature. So in this light I don't want responsive living architecture that does my thinking and reacting for me, further distancing myself from the forces causes and changes that are taking place around me. Instead, I want flexible, fixable, high-quality architecture that I participated in, have knowledge of and that I am capable of maintaining, changing and nurturing.