AD 210 PROTOCELL ARCHITECTURE

Description

Throughout the ages architects have attempted to capture the essence of living systems as design inspiration. However, practitioners of the built environment have had to deal with a fundamental split between the artificial urban landscape and nature owing to a technological ‘gap’ that means architects have been unable to make effective use of biological systems in urban environments. Protocell Architecture is an edition of AD that shows for the first time that contemporary architects can create and construct architectures that are bottom up, synthetically biological, green and have no recourse to shallow bio-mimicry. In the next few decades, synthetic biology is set to have as much, if not more, impact on architecture as cyberspace and the digital. The key to these amazing architectural innovations is the Protocell.

CONTENTS

• Neil Spiller and Rachel Armstrong: About the Guest Editors
• Spotlight: Visual highlights of the issue
• Neil Spiller and Rachel Armstrong: Introduction: It’s a Brand New Morning
• Martin Hanczyc: Structure and the Synthesis of Life
• Leroy Cronin: Defining New Architectural Design Principles with ‘Living’ Inorganic Materials
• Cronin pioneers a fundamentally new approach to materials, scaling up from the nanoscale.
• Mark Morris: Dream a Little Dream
• Omar Khan: An Architectural Chemistry
• Neil Spiller: Protocells: The Universal Solvent
• Rachel Armstrong: How Protocells Can Make ‘Stuff’ Much More Interesting
• Philip Beesley and Rachel Armstrong: Soil and Protoplasm: The Hylozoic Ground project
• Dan Slavinsky: Authorship at Risk: The Role of the Architect
• Neri Oxman: Proto-Design: Architecture’s Primordial Soup and the Quest for Units of Synthetic Life
• Oxman explores how material properties are a potent intermediary for the built environment.
• Paul Preissner: Back to the Future
• Lisa Iwamoto: Line Array: Protocells as Dynamic Structure IwamotoScott Architecture
• Nic Clear: AVATAR and the Politics of Protocell Architecture
• Bill Watts: Counterpoint: Bettering Biology?

136 pages, color ills / 21 x 27,5 cm / English