Nanotectonica

Nanotectonica design research

by Jonas Coersmeier

Brooklyn, NY 2020

Introduction

NANOTECTONICA is the encompassing term for our design-based research into the structures, aesthetics and design ramifications of the Nanoscale, which originated as project-based investigations within our architectural practice around 2000, and then developed into a series of academic seminars beginning in 2007.¹ The present publication deriving from this work, Nanotectonica, was conceived as both a textbook and a visual catalog formalizing our research and documenting our production over the past decade. As such, Nanotectonica serves as both an in-class reference following the seminars’ structures and a means of rendering our work accessible to audiences beyond those of the design disciplines.

I write this as 2020 turns into 2021, just one year after the nanoscale, infectious agent now known as COVID-19 emerged to cause the greatest global pandemic in recent memory, when excess deaths due to the agent reached 10,000 per day, and mass-vaccinations to counter the agent finally exceeded one million per day - though exclusively in the Northern Hemisphere.² Instead of underscoring our shared, physiological vulnerabilities, the continuing pandemic has come to mark an unprecedented convergence of social, political, and ecological crises on a global scale, especially as contrasting vaccination maps and environmental vulnerability indices reveal our shared, systemic inequities. Indeed, the pandemic has exposed even the most subtle injustices of our built world, thereby challenging the design disciplines to, firstly, come to terms with their complicity in these injustices, and secondly, to reverse them with urgency.

For any response to crises of such magnitudes to stand a chance of reversing some of these injustices, it needs to explicitly address the intricate, usually unseen mechanisms and relationships driving the crises. This entails critical considerations of the default, extractivist mode underlying any and every interaction between human beings and natural resources. Fundamentally, crises at global scales expose our instrumentalized idea of nature as an inadequate concept that only serves to obstruct efforts towards equity and inclusion along all ecological vectors, whether human and/or non-human, and whether nature and/or technology. In particular, the Coronavirus driving the global pandemic dramatically marks the convergence of nature and technology, as its emergence (animal-human), proliferation (humanhuman), and management (distancing, quarantine, and newly derived mRNA vaccines) pointedly refute even long-standing dichotomies between nature and technology.

Coronaviruses have characteristic club-shaped spikes that project from their surface, which in electron micrographs create an image reminiscent of the solar corona, from which their name derives.³

The solar corona is an aura of plasma extending millions of kilometers from the Sun, while the spikes of the SARS COVID-2 virus are surface normals extending some 20 nanometer from the virion membrane. These spikes, which the virus uses to infiltrate cellular membranes, can only be seen under an electron microscope. (Optical microscopes can only resolve objects larger than 200 nanometer, or half the wavelength of visible light.) The poetic reference to the stellar effect, manifested in the naming of the deadly virus, seemingly affirms our desire for coherence across vastly different scales. Or, perhaps, it reminds us that size does indeed matter.

Figure 1: The virions of coronaviruses Figure 2: The corona of the sun during an eclipse

Size Matters

Our fascination with both Universality and the scale variance of physical objects has driven our design-based research into the Nanoscale. That is, we believe the desire to unify the seemingly disparate domains of quantum mechanics and general relativity should be perceived as an engine for innovation. Gravitational force is all powerful at the top of the scales, while it is insignificant at the Bottom 4 Instead, electromagnetic forces govern nanoscale interactions. The “theory of the big” sees the universe as fundamentally smooth and curved, like the stellar aura of plasmas or galactic halos, while the “theory of the small” sees the universe as essentially striated, lumpy and sharp-edged, like the club-shaped spikes projecting from the Coronavirus. Despite over a century of work, a unified quantum-gravity theory remains under construction.5 The big and small are still dancing.

Design Research

Our studies venture out into science and theory as they explore the idea of the smallest. They consider the smallest hypothetical body, brick, cell, point particle, and raise the problem of explaining objects exclusively in these terms – a form of reductionism often associated with microscopy. The studies also review dualism as a persistent yet inadequate model for describing the entanglements of nature, culture, mind and body, and how some contemporary thought turns to matter for less binary perspectives. Furthermore, they discuss the critique of classical hylomorphism, the concept of being as a compound of matter and form, and compare it with models of becoming and individuation. While striving to promote cognition through theoretical discourse, our studies are ultimately directed towards basic questions of design. How do things form, and what as designers do we have to do with it? Do we breed, seed and cultivate, or do we plan and construct? Do we collaborate with and ascribe design intelligence to machine and material, or do we simply use tools and devices to author?

Design research here refers to three linked modes of inquiry: The first invests in the concept of design itself. It discusses the problem of the ‘creative act’ in its relation to media and methods (including the questions above), and offers a design methodology as testing ground for this discourse. The second engages in project-based research production. This includes historical references [see Historical Grounds] and cross disciplinary sources for cognitive and material models in support of a specific design agenda. The third entails original research production, the work with the Electron Microscope [see Nanographia and SEM lab], which simultaneously is the most concrete and speculative form of research here: concrete as it borrows its technical routine and device from the ‘natural sciences’ and produces tangible (visible) results; speculative as it turns away from objectifying and recording nature and instead proposes the multi-dimensional and interactive operations (the blind folded dance) with the electron beam as a model for the moment of design. As such it offers answers to disciplinary questions posed in the first mode, the concept of design.

Blind Probing

It may seem strange to use the microscope, an instrument often associated with atomism and mechanism, as the analog for an integrated and speculative model of design. The work on the electron microscope, however, provides access not just to the world of subvisible structures, but through its unique operating procedure to the obscure moment of design innovation. It can help externalize and thus prepare for theorizing this moment. When referred to as the ‘creative act’ this moment is often associated with the author’s inner domain and thus deemed too particular for investigation. Instead, the discussion tends to shift towards processes, means and methods of design. Nanotectonica, however, seeks to address the actual moment of design innovation as part of its first mode of inquiry, the concept of design.

For technical context: Since electrons have a shorter wavelength than visible light, electron microscopes can detect smaller objects than optical microscopes. The Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images a sample by probing it with a focused beam of electrons that scans across its surface; the sample emits secondary electrons which carry information about the properties of the specimen surface. This information gets recorded and mapped into images that represent the surface morphology of the sample. Unlike other types of electron microscopes, the SEM has a significant depth of field, which allows it to produce three-dimensional representations reminiscent of those achieved in photography. In the absence of light, secondary electron shadows sculpt spatial effects, rendered in grayscale pixel fields.

We describe the work on the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) as a blindfolded dance. Like in dance, the sequence of operation is multidimensional and interactive involving movement in space and time-based responsive maneuvers.

The process is blind in two respects: Firstly, it happens in the dark; light does not enter the scene, but an electron beam like a white cane scans the probe space. Secondly, the exploration is conducted without an overview or perceptual reference to the specimen. In a process of constant reorientation, local scans only gradually assemble a sense of object gestalt. The specimen is staged in a dark vacuum chamber, electrically grounded, accessible through mediated contact only, yet in constant exchange with the operator.

The SEM operator not only observes the specimen, but transforms it in the act of blind probing. Microscopists speak of “beam damage” when they refer to the effects of electron beam bombardment on the specimen and thus the creation of artifact. Similarly, physicists speak of the ”observer effect” in quantum mechanics, when the act of observation itself affects experimental findings. Beam damage is considered a side effect of the electron microscope’s imaging function. In order to minimize this effect, the operator works swiftly across an area of interest, as any persistent electron gaze would destroy the specimen. Constantly zooming, panning and sharpening the electron beam, she enters a state of focused distraction, rather than one of contemplation.6 The operator quickly develops an intuitive understanding that there is no object irrespective of her. In probing the elusive specimen, she simultaneously explores and creates new space of possible structures. The boundaries between empirical investigation and material speculation start to dissolve.

In Nanotectonica the Scanning Electron Microscope does not embody the purely analytical routine of the scientific method. Instead, it operates as a model for design, both as a conceptual model for the moment of design innovation, as well as a practice model for speculative design sensibility. The former refers to the non-deterministic character of the blind search. In this model the search is conducted in a vast space of design potential, that comprises immanent yet unrealized forms and ideas. The search is not indiscriminate, as design intention structures the space, nor is it globally directed, as the intention acts like the electron beam locally and in real time.7 The latter model is a design trainer and refers to the actual work on the scanning electron microscope. As part of the Nanotectonica seminar, we conduct electron microscopy laboratory sessions, during which architecture students gain first-hand experience in operating the SEM [see SEM Lab]. While the work on the machine is initiated by the desire to explore sub-visible structure and to produce images of a particular aesthetic quality, it serves as a training exercise that helps develop a light touch for design speculation. Complementing the work in the studio, which practices design in the long form, the work in the SEM-lab induces an instantaneous flow of mediate interaction with material, a state of focused distraction conducive to design.

SEM Aesthetics

In addition, Nanotectonica embraces the SEM as a prolific machine for aesthetic production. The aesthetics of the SEM are based in part on the device’s particular ability to produce spatial effects in the absence of light and shadow. While other types of electron microscopes generate flat images that evoke a sense of abstraction, SEM-based images hold an intrinsic quality of realism. Ever so close to black and white photography, these grayscale images often render smooth gradients into blurred fields and produce a kind of detached, moody atmosphere. In some instances, however, they feature sharp-edge, high-contrast depictions of the specimen and evoke the strange illuminant effect also common in astrophotography. Highlights are blown out by secondary electrons rather than solar radiation from unearthly horizons. In either case, there is an uncanny quality to these images, which momentarily suspends the association with photography.

The representational qualities of the SEM visuals enhance the inherent strangeness of the subvisible object. Nanoforms are less familiar to us simply because we see them less often and never directly. The inherent formal strangeness however could be a function of the different forces at work. Morphologies of the subvisible are less subject to gravitational force than those of the visible world. Electromagnetic force produces different forms. SEM representation plays with the familiar and unfamiliar describing an alien world in visually familiar terms. In New Landscape in Art and Science, Gyorgy Kepes describes how the gross world of regular sense perception can be connected to the subtle world by scientific instruments, and he establishes a relationship between images produced by these devices and those of contemporary abstract art. Images produced by the SEM often suggest just this relationship to artistic expression, possibly to a form of sublime realism.

Nature View

Nanotectonica studies concepts of nature and how they have changed since the advent of modern science, when humans started to abstract nature as something separate from themselves, an objectifiable domain ‘out there’. It discusses how this abstraction ushered in an epoch in which humans became the primary cause of permanent planetary change. Anthropo for “man,” and cene for “new”, the term anthropocene was introduced twenty years ago to identify the current geological age. Whether or not the term deserves a place in stratigraphic time, it is welcome in the context of this design research, as it questions the idea of a ‘natural environment’ and in consequence that of a ‘built environment’ as its counterpart. From a disciplinary perspective it exposes the human-centric agenda behind the model of built versus natural.

Advancements in engineering and instrument development in the seventeenth century, especially those of the super (-human) sensory apparatus, the microscope and telescope, helped define the nascent scientific method, and with it the dissociative and exteriorizing concepts of nature.

The microscope and the field of microscopy as it was established by Robert Hooke, Anton van Leeuwenhoek and others significantly expanded the world of direct human perception, and with it the role procedure-driven and observational methods play in early modern science. The microscope profoundly shaped the conception of science as an objectifying mode of inquiry that is based in a mechanistic and human-centric view of the world. In this view nature is considered an empirical field for investigation.

The early microscopists put forth popular science publications that described the novel optical instruments and the natural objects they were constructed to observe. These publications sparked excitement about the prosthetic extension of human reach into the celestial and micro worlds and about the structures extracted from them. Written in highly accessible language and larded with illustrations, the publications exerted an immense influence over a growing audience. Representational techniques from detail-attentive genres in both the arts and engineering were used, such as anatomical illustrations, portrait drawings and scaled technical drawings. Via new reproduction and publication techniques they were distributed widely and easily carried the implicit message: We are discovering an alien world that serves us wonders and delight, and we will conquer and control it.

Micrographia, published in 1665, stands as an example of such a seminal popular science book and the influence early science had on shaping mechanistic anthropocentrism. Its author, Robert Hooke, acted as both the engineer that helped define the new scientific method, as well as the artist that visualized its objectifying view of nature.

Four hundred years into the anthropocene, concepts of nature need to radically change again, not only to adapt to human-made ecological realities, but to address the unfolding climate catastrophe from within. We cannot address the crisis from the outside, as we are responsible for it – we are the crisis. The engineering and design disciplines have a particular responsibility in this transformation, not only for the immediate effect their work has on the environment, but also for the instrumental role they have played in forming the human-centric world view in the first place.

Beginnings

One beginning of Nanotectonica can be found in the project-based research our practice conducted for a series of speculative design proposals that explore the idea of artificial natures as architectural contexts, Green Plaza (2001), Memorial Cloud (2003) and New Silk Road (2006).8 ‘Green Plaza’ proposes a synthesis of genetically engineered flora and fauna for the dense infrastructural hub of Queen’s Plaza, New York. Memorial Cloud defines an upside down landscape over Ground Zero, a structure based on closest packing cell formations found in molecular crystal lattices. New Silk Road most directly informed the method and research interests developed in Nanotectonica over the following decade and beyond. In this project we identified structural similarity between the looping paths spun by the silkworm at subvisible scale and the paths of the ancient Chinese trade route visible on a global map. Through drawing we analyzed electron microscopy scans (Figure 3) of silk structures and derived from the study a simple substitution system, the silk code, which generates self-similar looping geometries at various scales. These geometries inform the organizational and structural substrate of the proposed synthetic landscape. The artificial nature theme of these early projects established an ongoing interest in concepts of nature as a field of inquiry for the design research [see Nature view].

Figure 3: Looping Silk Paths - Scanning electromicrograph showing the tip of the cremaster post of a monarch butterfly chrysalid embedded in the silk pad.

In an academic context the exploration began in 2007 with, firstly, securing the loan of a Scanning Electron Microscope from the Hitachi Corporation to The Pratt Institute, School of Architecture and, secondly, in 2008 collaborating on a research and design project with the Interdisciplinary Nanotechnology Institute of the University of Kassel, Germany. The early electron microscopy work at Pratt was conducted with a desktop SEM set up in close proximity to the design studio, while the SEM work in Kassel was conducted at the designated institute and its laboratories. The design research in Germany culminated in an installation titled “Nanotectonica” (2009) in the gallery of the University of Kassel’s Department of Experimental Design. Since then, Nanotectonica has been offered as a design research seminar at Pratt Institute every spring semester, first in the Undergraduate Architecture program, and since 2013 in Graduate Architecture (GAUD). Various Nanotectonica installations have been on display at Pratt’s Higgins Hall including the 2010 ACADIA exhibition “Life:Information”. The work on the SEM is conducted with Pratt at external laboratories, supported by institutional and industry sponsors. Laboratories include LPI Inc. New York, Cornell University’s Center for Materials Research, and the New York Structural Biology Center.

The convergence of nanotechnology with contemporary design tools, first tested in the project described above, points to a design research and production method, as well as to the pedagogical structure of the course Nanotectonica [see Design Research]. Significantly, this convergence is not limited to cataloging the phenotypical expressions of natural structures and their physiological performanes [see Physiology]. Rather, it is deployed to reconstruct, and thereby decipher, the form-building principles of such structures. Natural Structures here are not limited to carbon based systems that originate outside of the human world. It refers to all structures that have undergone an optimization process. Optimization here refers to a large set of conditions including: becoming better at transmitting forces or information (structural), more resourceful (ecological), more elegant (aesthetic). These natural structures may be the product of a design process, or a current state of a design process, by an engineer, designer, planner, plumber or computer scientist, breeding living algorithms, infrastructures or buildings. We consider all structures natural that support life on the planet.

We first explored the convergence of nanotechnology and contemporary design tools at a time when the idea of generative architecture re-emerged in the context of digital technologies. We refer to this moment as the algorithmic project in architecture, and we discuss it critically in this design research. It is argued that the search for generative design methods, along with the critique of compositional and allegedly more deterministic methods, had been part of architectural discourse since the early twentieth century.9 Since the advent of the algorithmic project at the end of the past century, architectural effects of the generative method have been widely privileged over compositional qualities, and the two have been considered incompatible. Compositional qualities have been associated with a higher degree of direct, top down engagement by the designer, operating at the level of design expression, while generative qualities have been seen as the result of operations at the scripted substrate of the design engine. Nanotectonica is disrupting these categories and offers an integrated model for design.

Jonas Coersmeier New York City, Winter 2020

Summary

Nanotectonica examines the relationship between ‘natural’ and architectural systems through the convergence of nanotechnology and contemporary design tools. A design research and production project that studies structures and organizations at multiple scales, it utilizes computational design and fabrication techniques to grow, construct and build novel material systems, intricate assemblies, and architectural artifacts.

Nanotectonica discusses changing concepts of Nature as they pertain to ecological thinking and building, and the architectural mandate in the midst of a global climate crisis. It points at the problem of distinguishing nature from technology, investigates a new understanding of living systems, in both human-made ecological realities and artificial life (AL) scenarios, and offers an integrated reading of the term ‘natural structures’.

The design research employs nanotechnology, specifically the scanning electron microscope (SEM,) and digital tools of analysis for a deeper understanding of carbon-based and algorithmic structures at various scales. The investigation is not limited to the phenotypic expressions of such structures, but seeks to decipher and invent their organizing and form-building principles. While the SEM is used as an instrument for the analysis of sub-visible structures, it also serves as a model for a speculative design method, ‘blind probing’, which operates outside of the duality of the generative and determinative routines.

The study refers to a lineage of naturalists, microscopists, engineers and thinkers that have explored the microworld and addressed the concept of the smallest.

It critically discusses ideas of bionics and biomimicry, and rejects scientific and design methods that idealize and reduce nature to an empirical field for investigation.

Nanotectonica aims to communicate a sense of urgency for overcoming a human-centric view of the world that has legitimized the exploitation of our planet and led to near social and ecological collapse.

Historical Grounds

Nanotectonica conjoins theory and method of design. The research examines concepts of nature and models for design, and discusses the problem of their relationship to technology, and to each other. It also practices methods of research and design production [see Design Research]. Concepts and methods are critically discussed in the context of historical precedents and along a lineage of artists, scientists and engineers, who have pioneered ecological thinking and building. A quick run-through:

Robert Hooke shaped the nascent field of modern science by building microscopes and visualizing the minute bodies he observed [Micrographia]. Ernst Haeckel discovered species of the micro-world, idealized his findings in illustration and introduced the larger public to evolutionary theory as well as his own sinister version of Darwinism [Propaganda in Artform]. Rene Binet translated Haeckel’s art forms to Art Nouveau architecture and decoration [Esquisses Decoratives]. Raoul France promoted the integration of biological processes with technology and laid ecological ground in periodicals on life in the micro-world and in the soil [Early Ecology and Biotechnik]. The work of Hooke, Haeckel and Francé raises the problem of representation as it relates to the dissemination of particular views of nature. The aesthetic discussion addresses the detached, decontextualized specimen drawing and the analytical autopsy drawing as models for architectural representation.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, like Hooke and Haeckel, drew structures related to what he saw through the microscope, often in the form of analytical studies of synaptic connections whose functional implications led him to develop the Neuron Doctrine [Drawing the Nervous System]. D’Arcy Thompson’s drawings of topological transformation promote physical laws as determinants of biological form and structure, an alternative model to natural selection in species development [Growth, Form and Structuralism]. Associating these modes of representation in biology to drawing conventions in architecture, Cajal’s work combines the functional diagram with the detail section, while Thompson uses the diagram as an operational drawing.

Gyorgy Kepes re-established the relationship between scientific investigation and artistic expression on the cusp of the digital revolution by correlating scientific imaging with contemporary abstract art [New Landscape in Art and Science]. Frei Otto devised open taxonomies for ‘natural structures’ and included in this category procedurally optimized engineering systems for which he built analog computation models [Natural Models and Lightweight Structures]. Buckminster Fuller developed – along with his part-to-whole concept of energy and synergy –a geometrical system of tetrahedron and octahedrons. It became the basis for the geodesic dome, which, as was later discovered, resembled the molecular structure of the fullerene [Synergetics and Fullerenes]. He related his studies on tension networks to radiolaria in order to understand the properties of ‘skeletal’ structures. Robert Le Ricolais like Haeckel, studied radiolaria, and like Fuller, was interested in the tensional integrity of such natural structures, which inspired his tensegrity models and space frame structures [Experiments in Structure]. Anne Griswold Tyng related morphology and geometry, specifically the study of platonic form to human consciousness, and wrote extensively on gender issues in architecture [Anatomy of Form].

Christopher Langton defined Artificial Life as ‘life as it could be’ and attempted to expand the field of biology beyond carbon based organisms to include human initiated living systems and synthetic natures [Artificial Life]. Aristid Lindenmayer developed a formal system for rewriting strings of symbols that describe the developmental processes of plant structures and their behaviors [Synthetic Plants]. Stephen Wolfram ran cellular automata to show that computation must be explored experimentally, and that we could compute the physical universe if we only had enough CPU power [New Kind of Science]. Benoit Mandelbrot developed a theory of self-similarity in natural systems and coined the term “fractal” [Geometry of Roughness].