GREENwichFORUM

06-02-09

Rachel Armstrong

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

06-02-09

Alan Powers

‘The nine mens Morris is fild up with mud,
And the quaint Mazes in the wanton greene,
For want of tread are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter here,
No night is now with hymne or carol blest;
Therefore the Moone (the governesse of floods)
Pale in her anger, washes all the aire;
That Rheumaticke diseases do abound.
And through this distemperature, we see
The seasons alter; hoared headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson Rose,
And on old Hyems chinne and Icie crowne,
An odorous Chaplet of sweet Sommer buds
Is as in mockery set. The Spring, the Sommer,
The childing Autumne, angry Winter change
Their wonted Liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knowes not which is which;
And this same progeny of evils,
Comes from our debate, from our dissention,
We are their parents and originall.’

This (in original spelling) is a speech by Titania, the Fairy Queen, from the second act of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, dating from the 1590s.

It can be interpreted today as a statement about climate change from a pre-scientific age. What it says is that the argument between the king and queen of fairlyland, which is explained in the play, is the cause for the seasons getting out of joint, and people on earth being confused and unhappy.

This introduces the theme I want to discuss – the relationship between our understanding of the nature of the world, and the effect this has had on the physical reality. Tragically, we are now seeing precisely the sort of effects that Shakespeare described, of freak weather events, shifting seasonal patterns, leading to species extinction and the disturbance of interconnected ecological relationships.

In twenty minutes, I don’t have much time to connect this discussion to architecture. I would say, however, that architecture plays two roles in respect of climate change.

One could be described as its purposive role. I think you will all be familiar with this.
In the purposive role, buildings can be seen as a cause of resource use resulting in carbon emissions from embodied energy, construction costs and operational activity, introduction of toxic materials, rainwater run-off, urban heat island effect and other bad things. By the same token, they can reduce these adverse effects and even reverse them, becoming close to carbon neutral in construction and operation, and capable of hosting energy producing sources, from sun, wind and earth.

Purposive action need not be confined to buildings, even for architects. If you find you haven’t got buildings to design in the next few years, think about what else you can do. The American architect William McDonough’s book, Cradle to Cradle is a source of inspiration on the question of recycling. Strangely, for a green writer, he is against recycling as currently understood. In his view, recycling is what used to happen when you took your glass bottles back to the off licence or corner shop and they were returned to the bottling plant to be filled up again (and again and again ad infinitum). That was OK, if the distances were short, but today what is called recycling is nearly all ‘downcycling’, in which energy is used to reduce things to dust or molten state before the elements are then fed back through the industrial system, usually resulting in something of lower quality. Eventually, the material can be downcycled no more and becomes waste. McDonough shows the way to a situation where every component would be designed so that it could be re-used without processing, either to perform its original function, or a different one that was anticipated in the design.

Knowing what we know about climate change, we cannot in conscience aim to produce anything less than the best for new construction, and we need also to apply these remedies retrospectively to existing structures as fast as we can.

This doesn’t, however, deal with the root causes of the quarrel in fairyland. If enough people are to take purposive action, they could probably benefit from a deeper level of understanding than simply hedging their bets against disaster and half-denying its reality. The weakness of political process in relation to climate change shows the failure of imagination and understanding shown by all but a few. If you begin to understand the connections between cause and effect in the disruption of nature that has led to climate change, and see the way nature works through the lenses of both art and science, then participation in the rescue effort acquires a more profound meaning, and just might work. At least, this is where the creative arts can play a role, and the task of trying to salvage something from the mess could have a better chance.

Theory
Architectural theory is closely bound up with theories about nature. These have purposive and symbolic components, and sometimes, especially in pre-modern cultures, the two aspects were closely allied.

Origin myths are important for architecture’s grounding assumptions. When Vitruvius wrote about the classical orders of columns, their true origin was unknown, but he repeated what were presumably the standard stories about trees and carpentry, which were a purposive explanation, and the analogies with different types of human, male and female, which were an attempt at a symbolic explanation. We still don’t know why these forms emerged and crystallised as they did, still less do we understand their extraordinary potency through time.

The ‘primitive hut’ myth, as described by Vitruvius, gives prominence to framed structure as the essence of architecture. This has had an almost unchallenged dominance for two thousand years in the western world. Symbolically, it is about escaping nature’s harsh conditions by treating trees and other materials as examples of what Martin Heidegger called ‘standing reserve’, that is to say, stuff out there ready for taking. More ecologically gentle, more female, if you like, is the alternative story developed in the 19th century by Gottfried Semper that explains the origin of architecture in woven branches, evolving into textiles hung or spread over frames. In this, the disconnection between structure and space, between form and material, between function and decoration, is less harsh than in the Vitruvian tradition.

We can see now what happens when you take unlimited quantities of stuff without asking about the consequences, and throw your rubbish back into the sea, the sky and the surface of the earth. And still our government is hell-bent on building more airport runways and nuclear power stations.

So-called primitive and other non-western cultures are more sophisticated, and there is an insoluble puzzle about whether their different world-views, reflected in religions such as Bhuddism and Taoism, restrained the kind of exploitation of the earth that western Christianity believed to be justified, owing to its adoption, through the doctrine of the Trinity, of the belief stemming from Aristotle, that body and sprit are separate, and that only human beings have minds.

A great deal went on, as it were, behind the back of the mainstream ideology, represented by recurrent symbolic representation in English churches of the Green Man, a mysterious pagan force of nature, his face merged in the leaves.

The Renaissance involved the rediscovery of pagan mythology, and its assimilation to Christian iconography. One of the most poignant signs of a shift in thinking was the willingness of artists to represent the naked human body, not as a pitiful source of shame at the last judgement, but as something evoking wonder and admiration, and the image of God, despite the fallen condition of humanity. We get those wonderful representations of Neo-Platonic poetry, Botticelli’s paintings of The Birth of Venus and Primavera, both from the early 1480s, in which the classical gods and goddesses are rendered life-size according to the wondrous new skills in representation created by perspective vision. They are emerging only gradually into the modern world, and are still set against a background with a tapestry-like clarity of detail. It has long been recognised that they reflect the neo-Platonic philosophy of the Medici court in Florence, in which a correspondence was assumed between what we see on earth and the unchanging archetypes on the plane of the soul. The characters in the pictures are personifications emerging from two of the four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water, which dominated all conceptual frameworks for understanding matter before the scientific age. Science destroyed these myths, and materialism based on the science took the spirituality out of nature, leaving it only as a plaything for artists who, it was thought, knew no better.

Shakespeare’s plays come from the same mental world as Botticelli’s paintings, and we could imagine his depiction of the quarrel between Oberon and Titania. In architecture, the parallels are not so close. Decorative schemes in buildings explore the neo-Platonic imagination, but in three dimensional form, the nearest equivalent is either in stage design or gardens. Renaissance gardens were narrative and theatrical, depicting and evoking the harmony between man and nature through the mythology of the ancient world, and celebrating the divine beneficence of an ordered cosmos through the actual materials provided by the Creator.

We also look to gardens to find the suppressed dark side of the Renaissance: the grotesque, the comic, the overtly sexual, the dangerous and the subversive, often represented as things of the deep earth, springing like water from the ground like naiads in shell-encrusted grottos, or hidden among trees like dryads. In her book, The Secret Life of Puppets, (Harvard 2001), Victoria Nelson begins with Renaissance garden grottos at the beginning of a search for gnosis, the form of intuitive knowledge and perception that was suppressed by the rise of scientific rationalism in the centuries following the Renaissance. The form of knowledge that dominated, especially from the mid 17th century onwards, when Europe turned its back with relief on its endless and destructive wars of religion, is described by Nelson with the word, episteme. Episteme is knowledge that you can describe clearly in words, and argue about. Gnosis is your gut feeling, the world of spooks and fairies, of moonlight and superstition. Both episteme and gnosis are Greek words, which divide knowledge according to the divided capacity of the human mind. As episteme rises, so gnosis is pushed underground, to become the property of the uneducated and of children, represented in stories and folk customs.

What does this have to do with our relationship to nature? The simple answer might be that gnosis can act as a sort of restraint on the consequences of episteme. Hence the increasing attention paid to the sayings and practices of some cultures that survived into the modern world with pre-scientific knowledge, such as the American Indians and the Australian Aborigines.

This split between mind and matter, or between body and spirit, is often known as dualism. If it reflects the work of René Descartes, it is called Cartesian Dualism. We have all grown up within it, whether we know it or not. At the end of this talk, I will suggest a more integrative view of the divided forms of knowledge.

Shakespeare is fascinating because he is teasing his sophisticated urban audience by putting fairies on the stage, and evoking the culture of the uneducated. The English antiquarian, John Aubrey, writing in the late 1600s, blamed the printing press the loss of folk beliefs:

‘Before Printing, Old-wives Tales were ingeniose, and since Printing came in fashion, till a little before the Civill-warres, the ordinary sort of People were not taught to read. Now-a-dayes Bookes are common, and most of the poor people understand lettetrs; and the many good Bookes, and variety of Turnes of Affaires, have putt all the old Fables out of doors: and the divine art of Printing and Gunpowder have frighted away Robin-goodfellow and the Fayries.’

Some of the gentry still resorted to fairies as a way of explaining the supernatural, however. I cannot resist sharing with you this passage from Aubrey’s Miscellanies:
‘Anno 1670, not far from Cyrencester, was an Apparition. Being demanded, whether a good Spirit or a bad? Returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious Perfume and a most melodious Twang. Mr W. Lillie believes it was a Fairie.’

We can recognise the truth of Aubrey’s account of ‘the decline of magic’, which was also a function of the reformation in religion. Yet despite 400 years of literacy up to the present, people remain avid for tales about fairies, ghosts and vampires. How else can we explain the huge popularity of The X Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer? There must be something about us and our relationship to the world that demands the abandonment of rationality and episteme, and a regression to gnosis.

The scientific theorist Mary Midgely has this to say about the conflict between the two sides of our nature:

‘Often we can split ourselves neatly in two so as to duck possible contradictions between them. But we cannot do this all the time. And if we are interested in the larger scene – if we want to put the whole jigsaw together – we cannot avoid the problem of how to relate these two modes. Above all, we have to relate them when we think about personal identity – about what is, and is not, essential in our lives, about the kind of being that each of us is as a whole.’ (Science and Poetry, Routledge, 2001, p.93)

These are thoughts that we can apply to architecture, which is notable for the way it has internalised the conflict of episteme and gnosis, and at the same time remains extremely unclear about the relationship between the two. Modernism pushed architecture towards the extremes of episteme, by insisting that space and structure, combined with a Taylorist attention to efficient operation, were the only things that mattered. At the same time narrative, symbol and ornament must be banished for ever to make them possible. Recent scholarship about the masters of modernism has emphasised the gnosis that was present, it seems, in all of them, even in Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Sometimes this was deliberately hidden by interpreters, or by the people concerned. Equally often, as in the case of Le Corbusier, the signs were there for anyone to pick up, but commentators preferred not to see them, or at least not to take them seriously.

Modern architecture ran into a slow-motion crash of episteme from the 1950s onwards. This is one way of explaining the underlying crisis to which The New Brutalism was the response. The failure to clear up the wreckage iis still backing up approaching traffic and blocking the road, in my view.

Pretty well all the architects from this period who are seen today as interesting had varying degrees of gnosis in their work, a quality that we may describe as poetry, or expression, or sensitivity to place, and which can often be captured in photography. At the same time, they lived through a period in which episteme or rationalism was strongly dominant. The members of Team 10, such as Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo van Eyck, made it possible for modern architects to talk in terms that respond to gnosis, while at the same time cross cutting with episteme. Much of the effort that has gone into the theory of modern architecture since the 1970s is directed towards integrating the two types of knowledge, but rarely articulates the difference between them or finds a satisfactory formula for their relationship. Phenomenology has been adopted by architecture as the most promising method, but it can be a very wordy and confusing way of getting to a point that might better be demonstrated by taking a walk in the woods:

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Than all the sages can

as William Wordsworth wrote in 1798.

In architecture, there have been some frantic moves to escape episteme, seen in the blobs, zoomorphic forms and revivals of Expressionism that have dominated our definition of the avant-garde since the 1990s. Much as I have enjoyed certain of them, I find them inadequate as representations of a valid approach to architecture. I would rather see them as an over-reaction, in which the relationship between process and outcome is distorted.

The role of developing digital design techniques as means of enabling this shape making has served to confuse the intention of the work. The approximation of digital process to natural process has, I feel, given a spurious greenwash to activities that lack real purposive aims. The exhibition Zoomorphic, new animal architecture at the V&A, 2003-04 in was, in my view, the nadir of this tendency, with its parallels between building form and animal form. Not all the buildings deserved to be explained in this simplistic way. What was more distressing to me was the lost opportunity to say anything of real value about the architecture-nature relationship, which is such an important if confusing one.

There is still an influential, supposedly avant-garde, movement based on complex computing used as a way to generate forms that correspond to natural growth. This seems to me reactionary and self-indulgent in the face of ecological disaster. Driven entirely by the engines of episteme, is part of the problem, not the solution. The situation was summarised for me in a review by Kester Rattenbury in Building Design of a symposium held at the AA by Kas Oosterhuis early in 2007, ‘Like modernism, the form, mythology and function of this movement have fused into one swaggering mass, prosducing isolated object buildings … set in, at best, landscapes. That’s ominous. In modernism, extraordinary and brilliant buildings were invented in the overwhelming list to build the new forms so excitingly available, but the resulting urban fabric was pretty awful. Sounds like we’re in for this again and we’ll work out what kind of envionment they make and how they might work socially in retrospect.’ (BD 2 February, 2007, p.16)

Work of this kind oscillates between episteme and gnosis, and yet fails to achieve any integration between them. It mistakes the form for the substance. It is still driven by one of the worst fallacies of episteme, that of the continuous avant garde. An avant-garde cannot be wished into existence. It comes by accident and only under great pressure.

Now we have ‘The New Ornamentalism’, produced by some smart people, but still, to my mind, a kind of evasion of the real business of gnosis. Once more, the computer allows the a short-circuit of a real commitment implied in the design and making of ornament, but the idea of ornament drawn and made by a human hand is still dangerous to the definition of modernism.

If the architecture of Oosterhuis and the AA Design Research Laboratory is, in purposive terms, no more than greenwash, and ‘The New Ornamentalism’ simply a veneer of cynical decoration, must architects choose between cleaning up the world by purposive but ungainly structures, or retreating to the position of clever decorators? I hope not, for the point about the change that we must all undergo as fast as we can is that, I hope, it will be brighter and better on the other side, however diminished our physical capacity for movement and action. We need a lot of gnosis to bring people along and resolve the dispute between Oberon and Titania which has messed everything up so badly.

While we may criticise the high modern movement at times for its rigidity, I think some people within it had a better understanding of the nature-culture relationship in architecture than critics of the movement allow. I give you here one of my favourite examples, the house designed by Serge Chermayeff in Sussex in 1938 for himself, which is all made up of straight lines, yet achieved one of the subtlest integrations of architecture and landscape, of inside and outside, of material and meaning, that there has ever been in Britain.

So where is the integration to be found?

I shall have to be super-quick in telling you something complex, that I hope you may feel like going off and exploring for yourselves.

I am telling it in terms of one thinker only, who, nearly thirty years after his death, was initially largely forgotten but seems to be having a come back. His name is Gregory Bateson, and it is almost impossible to categorise what he did in his life. It included biology, anthropology, psychology and cybernetics, and only at a late stage did he create a synthesis in his last books, Steps towards an Ecology of Mind, 1972, and Mind and Nature, a necessary unity. 1979.

Bateson came to believe that mind was not the exclusive property of human beings, or even of animals, but actually existed in the whole structure of the universe. This was not mind defined as conscious thought, but as the capacity to change, which involves a choice between different alternatives.

Through his amazingly wide knowledge and his insight, Bateson removed the distinction between aesthetics and purposiveness (another way of saying gnosis and episteme), and was prepared to see everything in the world as a linked-up process of form making. In his book Uncommon Wisdom, 1989, Fritjof Capra tells an anecdote of sitting with Bateson looking out over trees towards the Pacific Ocean. It is a passage too long to quote here, and it may not make much sense out of context, but I am quoting some of Bateson’s words, as recalled by Capra, from the end of the conversation, ‘the whole fabric of living things is not put together by logic. You see, when you get circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living world, the use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes.’ Bateson goes on to use the example of a thermostat as a system that responds like a living thing to outside stimulus, ‘If it’s on, it’s off; if it’s off, it’s on. If yes, then no; if no, then yes.’ The conversation moves on, until Bateson points to some trees and says ‘Logic won’t do for them.’ Capra asks ‘So what do they use instead?’

‘Metaphor.’
‘Metaphor?’
‘Yes, metaphor. That’s how this whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.’ (Uncommon Wisdom, pp.78-9)

I think this is essentially the same message that Peter Buchanan gives in Ten Shades of Green, architecture and the natural world, 2005.

‘It should be clear by now that green design, though not dauntingly difficult, cannot be achieved by any simplistic or formulaic approach: no single approach is likely to be adequate, let along appropriate or even applicable, to all situations. Green design goes far beyond merely specifying efficient “green” products, such as insulation, low-emissivity glass, water-conserving toilets, super-efficient mechanical equipment and non-polluting materials; and beyond also using replenishable, recycled and recyclable materials, recycling all rain and grey water and planting on roofs. Green design both influences the basic design parti of a building, especially the cross-section and the elaboration of the outer envelope, and transcends mere energy efficiency and the minimization of pollution. Instead it must attend to a whole range of matters from technical and ecological, to the economic and social, including even the cultural and spritial.’ (Ten Shades of Green, p.19)

I find that in architecture, there is an awful lot of mud obscuring some good things, and the patterns that should be the grounding of the subject, ‘for want of tread are undistinguishable.’ Shakespeare stated a fundamental truth that, fairies or no fairies, we carry notions in our heads that could save us or sink us, and we need to be clear about what they are.