TURN BUILDINGS INTO BEINGS
Dr. Rachel Armstrong prescribes a biological solution to stop architecture from crumbling,
Imagine a world where architecture heals itself, where buildings cope with damage and stress as would any living organism.
According to Rachel Armstrong, medical doctor and architect, this is not just possible; it’s necessary, even inevitable. In the current age of extinction, environmental uncertainty and planetary degradation — some call it the Anthropocene — our very survival will ultimately depend on learning how to work with natural forces rather than against them.
“It’s not about greening things,” the Oxford-educated polymath told the Ontario College of Art and Design University’s Urban Ecologies conference Thursday, “but developing new tools and avatars that will help us navigate the world.”
Armstrong is a professor of experimental architecture at the University of Newcastle. The goal of her research is what she calls, “living architecture.” The implication may be that conventional architecture is dead by comparison, but that’s not her point. Instead, she argues that buildings in the future will be less inert artifacts than organic structures designed not just to accommodate natural processes but to incorporate them.
“Architects,” she explains, “have to start thinking about buildings as new natural systems.”
But what about the built environment that already exists: Is it just abandoned and left to die? Or can it be brought back to life?
Armstrong’s answer begins in Venice, the historic city built on wooden piles sunk into a lagoon. These supports, which are slowly rotting, can be coated in limestone —“petrified” — through a process she calls “protocell technology.”
It would allow the footings to be sheathed in limestone and whole artificial reefs to be formed underwater. Armstrong is quick to point out that these techniques are still 15 to 20 years from implementation, but she insists the potential is enormous.
She also imagines using living organisms such as bacteria, algae and jellyfish as building materials. If that sounds far-fetched, consider the BIQ (Bio Intelligent Quotient) Building in Hamburg. Its windows are filled with water in which live algae that’s fed nutrients. When the sun comes out, the micro-organisms reproduce, raising the temperature of the water. BIQ residents say they love their new digs. It helps that they have no heating bills.
Armstrong then described how objects can be made of plastic dredged from the oceans. It could, she suggested, be a new source of material as well as a way to clean degraded waterways. Her basic desire is to make machinery more biological and unravel the machinery behind the biological. That means figuring out how bacteria talks to bacteria, how algae “communicate.” This isn’t new, of course, but this fusion draws closer all the time.
As that happens, she argues, “consumers can become producers.” In the meantime, the search for “evidence-based truth-seeking systems” continues.
Armstrong, who began her professional life as a doctor, credits her interest in architecture to the time she spent at a leper colony in India in the early ’90s. “What I saw was a different way of life,” she recalls. “I realized we need a more integrated way of being and living so we are at one with our surroundings.”
She foresees a world in which we are so at one with the environment that, “Our homes are not just part of our well-being, but a resource. Imagine your house could feed you and clean your water.”
Micro-organisms that grow, create heat and oils and trap sunlight are the key. “We will see more algaebased technology,” she says, “and bio-reactors that can produce food and energy. Already, there is an algae cuisine; it’s literally like growing crops in your window.”
The big question, Armstrong makes clear, is: “How do we make these things real?” Once that’s done, the sky will be the limit. Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca