bUILdINg AS NATURE Dennis Dollens Self Nature A commonly held misconception is that humans are creation’s panicle, blessed with dominion and pillaging rights to the earth (with no corresponding responsibility); I’m thinking of an alternative scenario. The plan is straightforward: Mirror public-library privileges, whose temporary loans are contingent on care of the book and mandatory return. Only, in this scenario, the library’s stacks are nature’s resources. Here, literacy means ecoliteracy, guiding bioremediation toward the environment while nurturing ideas for its care and understanding. Recycling nature’s library of elements, forces, and life is my essay’s substrate, a growing medium for the cultivar-idea that nature produces consciousness, thoughts, and ideas, and in turn, they produce design. This formulation seems clear: Design is part of nature. And I think now is the time to reweave architecture, planning, and design into nature’s plaited matrix of life. Toward this goal, I found in John Rajchman’s introduction to Pure Immanence, by Giles Deleuze, a constructive observation outlining what Deleuze learned from Hume1. And I think Rajchman’s view applies beyond his philosophical subject, becoming forceful for us when discussing design’s environmental and genetic role in an era of industrialized nature. More than merely mix –and match ideas from Rajchman, Deleuze, and others, including Dawkins, Leibniz, and Whitehead, I’m tying to extend their concepts. By cross-pollinating their thoughts I hope to support a design polemic in which ideas are understood as natural forces, like gravity and electromagnetism. If I’m hijacking ideas from these authors out of their original literary or philosophical context, it’s because they each carry necessary thought-molecules for discussing two difficult, related concepts. First, that architecture, urban planning, and design are genetic extensions of human thought; second, that ideas are genetically originated electromagnetic forces.
Implicit in Venter’s synthetic biology experiments, as well as those taking place in other labs, is the transformation of existing paradigms of life and styles of living; yet shifting perspectives are notoriously difficult. Extrapolating from cell theory into design theory is equally dicey, but suggests potential architectures imbued with lifelike biology hosting communities of bioremeadiating bacteria or plants within wall membranes or structural networks. Pushing this line of thought—if we broaden our concepts of mineral elements and molecular forces as constituents of life and consider applying bacteria and synthetic life as architectural materials or ingredients, we can employ science and technology to rehabilitate cities and buildings within the context of design. Taking cities and buildings seriously as latent bioremeadiators, even in their present states, we could begin to categorize them as protonatural. Seen as structures with growth potential, possessing vast vertical surfaces and valuable wall membranes—the physical interface of interior and exterior environments—we might “farm” them as pollution sensors and air filters. Additionally, if prosaically, we could cultivate existing buildings’ environmental assets, fostering interior water recovery and nurturing microclimates and growing conditions, as well as creatively designing for obvious untapped solar, wind, and water harvesting, thus bringing biodesign into close proximity with day-to-day living. Design becomes a part of neighborhoods, no longer relegated to mere studio activities divorced from constructed life. If we set goals for transforming buildings and cities into living systems, casting a positive atmosphere for bioremediation is critical for reversing perceptions that architecture and urbanisms are large dead objects. Retrofitting synthetic biology and eco technologies into existing structures can deliver rapid reversals from environmental liabilities to environmental assets. Helping buildings join local and regional information systems with remote sensing will bring them into global information networks, with potential benefits ranging from energy consumption, urban temperature control, water conservation, and even wildlife habitat
SITE DOCUMENTATION UQ 141
Consider: If we can conceive new forms, botanic relationships, and genetic procedures for hybridizing cities and buildings, we will be able to extend the more difficult idea of cities and buildings as life forms into our understanding. For example, recent breakthroughs by teams working with genome-sequencing scientist J. Craig Venter have, as the New York Times reported, “successfully transplanted the genome of one species of bacteria into another,” demonstrating that synthetic life may be
created to answer environmental problems. The creation of a synthetic bacterium is intended to “make cells that might take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and produce methane,” potentially reducing dependency on fossil fuels.2 Furthermore, related discoveries may aid water recovery in drought-stressed areas and eventually feed toxic waste to single-celled microorganisms with the potential for on-site, in-building sewage and toxic-substance reformation.
2004 South bank
MOTION+TRANSIT ANALYSIS Christian duell
Views of the background created through breaks in the middle-distance view are revealed through a slow pivoting of the building facades. In contrast, the background view (typically the skyline at CBD) is at such a distance that it remains stationary when viewed in motion. The tall buildings of the CBD therefore become not only landmarks but a constant point of reference and orientation. This analysis reveals that in the foreground (particularly from highspeed modes of transportation), vertical forms are perceived as a blur, while horizontal lines create linear patterns that vary according to topography. Unlike the foreground view, which is experienced as a two-dimensional plane, the middle view is experienced as a series of slowly pivoting, threedimensional planes. FOREGROUND MIDLEGROUND BACKGROUND
1 Bus West End 2 Bus City 3 Train City 4 Train West End 5 Car West End 6 Car City 7 Footpath City 8 Footpath West End 8
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management. Analyzing where current design is pathological and attending to it presents opportunities for systemically introducing healthy biosystems, signaling our intention to learn, grow, and evolve biomimetically. Theory Thinking Nature Consulting one definition of immanent (holding within) and bonding it with the similar sounding, but differently rooted, imminent, we hybridize both words. Immanence, gleaned from Deleuze and laminated for this text with its near-opposite, imminence, denotes withheld potential, emergence, development, and evolution. Further, by sequencing and splicing immanence and imminence as monad-immanence, we create a kind of genetic word mutation, a friction, an oscillating thought-field. Seemingly a mere word game, this etymological graft aids an old-growth, metaphysical idea embodied in the word “monad,” helping it evolve, break, and resurface the widespread, bipolar concept that the environment—nature—is simultaneously dead and alive.
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SITE DOCUMENTATION UQ 143
Yet, nature is only alive. I think we must reorder our generally limited perception of it in order to widen definitions of species, molecules, and forces, understanding them as coalescent with generative ideas linking life to human-made objects (design and architecture included). Then, by examining the role of minerals and elemental forces and recognizing their organic, life-sustaining nature (understanding them as indispensable to consciousness), we implicate human thinking as a force of nature. And that further implicates idea-extensions in craft, horticulture, industrial design, architecture, and planning as naturally derived. The usefulness of such linguistic extension, of course, lies not only in confirming our physical being in nature but also in comprehending our thought process as a force of nature. What Deleuze calls “our nature” underscores this process: nature not divided into “alive” and “dead.” Thought not understood as a cosmic phenomenon. Instead we may recognize that thought and thinking are parts of nature, that consciousness and thought are environmentally dependent, that ecology relies on the cultivation of thinking and critical observation, the harvesting of ideas morphed into objects. Therefore, “our nature” is central when discussing Nature’s nature. Our understanding of human consciousness and, by extension, its design production is epistemologically clarified, helped with a biological foundation locating thought and building as genetically driven. With a genetic base we can then comprehend human impulses to build as analogous to constructions by our counterparts in the wild, witnessed by nests, hives, and mud works.
park Road TRANSIT ANALYSIS Kristen Fitzgerald 2005 1 Figure Ground Diagram 2 Figure Ground Diagram 3 Movement + Space Usage
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PUBLIC MOvEMENT
MINOR TRAFFIC
MODERATE TRAFFIC
PRIvATE ZONE WITH MINIMAL TRAFFIC
PARK RD RAILWAY CAR + PEDESTRIAN WALKING ZONE
4 Figure Ground + Existing Urban plan zoning CONSERvATION
LIGHT INDUSTRY
LOW-MED DENSITY
FUTURE INDUSTRY
RESIDENTIAL
PARK
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LOW DENSITY
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5 Method of Travel to work: bus + train use in the suburbs < 3% OF POPULATION
6 Method of Travel to work: bus use per suburb 3
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7% - 9%
11% - 13%
9% - 11%
7 Method of Travel to work: car use per suburb 40% - 47%
51% - 53%
47% - 49%
53% - 55%
49% - 51%
8 Method of Travel to work: train use per suburb <3%
5% - 7%
3% - 5%
9 Method of Travel to work: ride/walk per suburb 5
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11% - 13%
7% - 9%
13% - 15%
10 Street axes through site PRIMARY STREET AXES SECONDARY STREET AXES
2005 park Road BUS ANALYSIS Tony Loong 2005 11 Bus Route
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BUS INTERCHANGE
DISTRICT BUS ROUTE
LOCAL BUS ROUTE
BUS STOP
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park Road RAIL ANALYSIS Katherin Khoo 2005 12 Rail lines CLEvELAND LINE BEENLEIGH / GOLD COAST LINE
park Road VIEW ANALYSIS prue Exelby 2005 9
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Designers understanding this evolutionary lineage have nature, alternatively with cultural history, as an under explored design territory to learn with. Our disposition to build cities, structures, and objects is, at a fundamental level, genetic—not very different from termites’ genetic disposition to build solar-oriented, naturally ventilating adobe megastructures. Genetic derivation ties our urbanism, architecture, and design together as biologically driven events stitching our cities securely into nature. Understanding a scenario such as this might alarm us into practicing environmentally conscious safebuilding while simultaneously illustrating needed safeguards preventing design from destroying the work and environments of other species. While the descent of industrialization, manufacturing, and materials leaves little trace of nature in today’s building and design industry, its evolutionary course, begun with stone tools, sticks, hides, and mud, nevertheless continues, if in a mostly repressed and unrecognized form. I think we can take a global look at the contemporary buildings of homeless people worldwide, or study the spontaneity of urban organisms from colonias and favelas to witness genetic building impulses manifested in constructed form. Architectural shelters built with indigenous environmental materials—collected cardboard, plastic, fabric, rope, adobe, metal and wood scraps—testifies to a universal, genetic disposition to build. Homeless and adaptive shelters demonstrate material and structural inventiveness evolving with minimal resources and tools for immediate environmental protection. For understanding this process and illuminating its biological workings—genetic impulses translating ideas into physical works—biologist Richard Dawkins’s book The Extended Phenotype is indispensable.3 Our Nature / Nature’s Nature Rajchman tells us: “What the young Deleuze found singular in Hume’s empiricism is then the idea that this self, this person, this possession [individual consciousness], is in fact not given. Indeed the self is only a
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park Road SOUND ANALYSIS Erin Wheatley 2005 1 Sound level readings 2 legend 3 Train noise distribution 4 Traffic noise distribution 5 Combined train + traffic noise distribution
park Road CLIMATE ANALYSIS Jacqui Maestracci 2005 6 Solar access + prevailing winds
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park Road PUBLIC ATTRACTORS Mohd Farez Mustapha 2005 7 Public vs private ownership PUBLIC PRIvATE
8 Parks + recreation PARKS + RECREATION BRISBANE RIvER
park Road EDUCATION PRECINCTS Fadzai Mangoma 2005 9 Education Precincts ST LAURENCES COLLEGE ST ITAS CATHOLIC PRIMARY SCHOOL 1
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THE DUTTON PARK STATE SCHOOL THE UNIvERSITY OF QUEENSLAND BURANDA PRIMARY STATE SCHOOL MASTER HOSPITAL STATE SCHOOL ST JOSEPHS CATHOLIC PRIMARY SCHOOL SOMERvILLE HOUSE EAST BRISBANE PRIMARY SCHOOL QUEENSLAND GOvT EDUCATION
park Road SITE SECTIONS Eliza Morawska 2005 10 Section B 11 Section D 12 Section A
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fiction or artifice in which, through habit, we come to believe, a sort of incorrigible illusion of living; and it is as this artifice that the self becomes fully part of nature—our nature.” (Deleuze, 12). Rajchman, via Deleuze, implicates consciousness as epiphenomenal and emergent. Adding to this, I’m thinking consciousness includes the appropriation of environmental data interacting with monadlike thought systems—a trait more often viewed as hive-mind in insects. Through emergent ideas and thought synthesis, a transcendental environmentalism is conceivable; the perceptual recognition of unexplained physical conditions for consciousness’s extension in idea-to-hand production, resulting in design, manufacturing, architecture, objects, and eventually cities. Our transcendent environment is extrapolated from nature, cultural traditions, and objects even as it is examined and interpreted by consciousness tying the world of matter and molecular force together. Animate life, inanimate matter, and natural forces are three strands braiding this ephemeral life matrix. The consequence of our spiraling, plaited matrix is life and thought’s union, where Deleuze’s “incorrigible illusion” comes into being, “incorrigible illusion” implying that we don’t know our place in nature, we don’t understand ideas as an evolutionary forces, and we don’t know how to describe complex molecular fields and their behavior where design is concerned. And, having only just begun to map and decode genes, we don’t very well know boundaries between culture and genetics. For example, recent biological experiments document genes responding to, and evolving in, diverse geographic localities and doing so much faster that previously thought. Research conducted at the University of Maryland, the University of Chicago, and Cornell University supports theories that culture is an evolutionary force. The article notes: “‘If we ask what are the most important evolutionary events of the last 5,000 years, they are cultural, like the spread of agriculture, or extinctions of populations through war or disease,’ said Marcus Feldman, a population geneticist at Stanford. These cultural events are likely to have left deep marks in the human genome.”4
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SITE DOCUMENTATION UQ 147
As Edward O. Wilson wrote: “What is human nature? It is not the genes, which prescribe it, or culture, its ultimate product. Rather, human nature is something else for which we have only begun to find ready expression. It is the epigenetic rules, the hereditary regularities of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another, and thus connect the genes to culture.” Wilson earlier noted:
2004 park Road Station
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SPACE Erin Wheatley
The brief for this project was to create a transit-oriented development at the Park Road Station site. The existing station is located in close proximity to the historic Boggo Road Gaol and enclosed within a residential demolition control precinct, characterized by vernacular timber and tin houses. The aim was to propose a new form of density that informed new ways of living and travel. The project utilizes the existing vernacular as a mechanism for orientation, and the train station as a place marker in the city. The latter acts as a threshold, blurring the boundary between the individual parts of the city, integrating the precincts into a unique city fabric. A figure ground study of the area revealed the predominant pattern of planning based upon the desire for defined public and private realms— Brisbane’s public space is on the street; private space in the green backyard. So how does one increase density while retaining unique characteristics of the inner-city residential areas? How do you deal with issues of scale, privacy, and the Australian attachment to the backyard? Using the courtyard typology as a method of retaining the backyard, the design enables ownership of public space, one that mirrors the Australian mentality of home ownership. The detached form of the development mirrors the language of the single dwelling and allows for an increase in bulk and scale. The building folds down to break down the scale of a block. The rhythm of the vertical element and the reuse of timber help balance nostalgia and new forms. The raised backyard introduces new commercial and retail tenants at ground level. The strip is continued; the figure ground patterning of the area is repeated, and the area develops as part of a larger fabric from private realm to public street, precinct, and city.
“Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the regularities of sensory perceptions and mental development that animate and channel the acquisition of culture.”5 Following Wilson’s thoughts, it seems reasonable to expect that genetic factors are pivotal in the cultural expression of cities, buildings, and design. Monadic Immanence Pure Immanence may then be considered a metaphysical key for discussing thoughts and extended phenotypes as natural forces. Amending Gottfried Leibniz’s 1814 theory of atomic-scale, particlemirroring consciousness (monads), I am using immanence via Deleuze to implant Leibniz’s The Monadology with properties of withholding/becoming, and further, as a component for thinking of “our nature” understood as part of nature not dependent on spirit, theology, or vagaries of the soul.6 Accordingly, we may surmise the environmental implications of Deleuze’s work and inject those strains of Pure Immanence into The Monadology for environmental and design theory. Not until Alfred North Whitehead hybridized monadism in the early 20th century, did Leibniz’s theory meet the context of modern physics and theories of consciousness. Later still, in 1995 Deleuze analyzed The Monadology in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, bringing Leibniz’s work into focus for art and design.7 Following Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s splicing new ideas into the definition of monads, Leibniz’s old theory began to revive, currently helping us evolve our comprehension of nature (and the nature of our design in nature.) Today, with ongoing discoveries in psychology, physics, and biology, the potential of conceiving Deleuze’s Pure Immanence from a biologic/ monadic perspective, partially reflected from The Fold and reinforced with strands knotted in Leibniz, Whitehead, and Dawkins, eases monads into a design discussion as monadic immanence. The discussion’s outline factors mineral trace elements and
atomic forces—the natural environment—as they pertain to consciousness and thinking. And, hypothetically, monadic immanence’s encapsulation and distillation of thought’s being and composition cultivates further growth, mirroring the physics of thinking in the negative and positive charges of electrochemical bonding (like atoms into molecules) and electromagnetic neurological communication in our conscious and unconscious generation of ideas. Reflectively, this seems to require, first, that ideas are systemically alive or a type of elemental force, and second, that thoughtextensions are genetic. For us, in an age of tragic environmentalism and needed emergency bioremediation, an expanded conceptualization of matter, molecular bonds, atomic force, design, and life is one pathway for thinking of our design production, in the big picture, as including living properties. Monad immanence helps to theorize human thought and design in nature as part of nature. Humans in nature seem self-evident, but they are not. We need to reexamine our conceptualization of nature in light of the hypocritical stereotyping given to it in traditional thinking. Nature has been, and still is, seen by billions of us (and by many of our governments) as hostile and/or hideous, needing to be conquered and dominated, or to be given as corporate, economic freeholds or as sites for biopiracy, mineral ravaging, and ocean dumping. Having a conceptual foundation for nurturing design ideas related to the interdependence of matter, force, biology, and consciousness is necessary in order to come to terms with, for example, discoveries such as The Economist’s recent announcement that microbial and bacterial life forms are symbiotic, not parasitic, to our being.8 Our consciousness is apart from their being and their being is apart from our consciousness— we are walking symbiotic environments, microcosms of the natural world. This is a fundamental shift for many self-centered humans and our relationships with other creatures, plants, life-giving minerals, and life-animating molecular forces. Accordingly, a reordered view of our place in nature seems appropriate and necessary. Detailing what we think as a natural, genetic/cultural process, as well as what we design and build as extended phenotypes, sets possibilities for building more responsibly. Architecture learns Flower Power . . . maybe If designing a building to capture carbon monoxide, purify the air, recycle water, 2004 Toowong VIDEO ANALYSIS Annabelle gish
harvest power, and cool itself, or imagining older buildings retrofitted with leaf-like functions or utilizing firefly and jellyfish proteins for bioluminescence cladding is an emerging vision for planning, design, and architecture, then the model of today’s design industry is inadequate. Consider materials excreted underwater, at low temperatures, using enzymes and waterborne minerals to make seashells, and then ask, Why can’t that process be mimicked to make bridges, highways, and building parts? These and other concerns cast doubt on the level of today’s building materials. They underscore the need for architecture and design practiced with information coming from biology, physics, engineering, agriculture, and permaculture. Upgrading design’s tools for digital visualization of nature is critical for working and aesthetic biodesign. Studio doors need to be opened to design research using technical and medical imaging, microscopy, and other visualization processes not traditionally associated with design. On a related note, I think our current emphasis on aesthetics is excellent, a great strength, but can be one-sided—aesthetic production requires appropriate materials and technologies, and I think questions are arising: Why can’t buildings be organically sensitive, nontoxic, and smart as well as aesthetic and technical friends with nature? Related to university and studio research, digital biosimulation programmed to interpret, analyze, shape, and optimize performance of landscapes and buildings is currently practical if not widely taught. Computational generation and analysis of clustered forms instead of single, rectangular building envelopes, or generated fractal surfaces, for example, optimizing photovoltaic orientation and surface area are procedures waiting to be more fully optimized. Structures with clustered units, say mimicking the distribution of flowers around their stalks, have greater fluid dynamic as well as aesthetic potential than current building typologies. Flowers, plants, and shells provide immediate models for researching spaces, forms, systems, stacking, and clustering. And, to be clear, I am not advocating architecture or design that looks like flowers, shells, or animals.
This is not to propose we follow agriculture blindly (or follow the path of GMOs at all). Yet the practice of agriculture, reaching back millennia, is a living and working model for understanding and working with living biological systems. From agriculture, science, and mathematics, plant morphology is understood in algorithmic form, allowing digital exploration of botanic geometries relating to shape transformations, connectivity, proportion, massing, and environmental simulations. Agriculture manipulates viruses and bacteria, hybridizes plants for difficult environmental conditions, changes landscapes, and engineers irrigation. With such abilities, looking at agriculture with design-biomimetics in mind, analyzing its positive aspects and how they could be applied to building reconnects design with a former ally and with needed bioresources. So while contemporary agriculture is an imperfect example, it points out a polar contrast: that starting from the same point in history, agriculture is today still rooted in nature (even if that nature is endangered). Planning, architecture, and design are far more removed from environmental coexistence, far more environmentally damaging, and far less available to bioremediation than agriculture. Comparing planning and architecture with agriculture, we note that these expressions of human nature with Nature’s nature have survived for over 10,000 years and have only recently drastically changed their relationship. In this time, cities and architecture have moved from solely organic materials used to fabricate shelters (their aggregate akin to beehives or ant colonies) to industrialized materials and processes that eradicate all nature in their way. Planning and architecture’s evolution found success (until recently) by divorcing from the environment and embracing toxic industrial materials and construction processes. Losing track of nature, architects and planners substituted the concept of site and program for environment and place, translating nature into parcels of real estate bartered within judicial systems having no bearing on, or justice toward, nature. Furthermore, placing architecture and design outside of nature obscured collaborative benefits such as flood control, coastal erosion, natural habitats, and fire protection as well as unnecessarily removing environmental experience from urban and suburban life. In light of recent scientific data concluding that forms of life are more varied and symbiotically interdependent than has been traditionally believed, it seems futile to categorize nature
SITE DOCUMENTATION UQ 151
Contemplating design with biological properties obviously brings horticulture, gardening, and agriculture to mind. Modern agriculture relies on science, technology, and industry pared with skilled and semiskilled labor. Its global scale and resulting land use, along with the production and nurturing (in some cases creation and abuse) of plants, animals, climate, water, technology, built infrastructure, and human energy is not one to be dismissed as a model when
bioarchitecture and design have no such teacher.
2004 Roma Street
REDEFINING CENTERS Esi-Kilanga bowser + Matthew priest
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SEQ has been extremely dependent on Brisbane, its major city, not only for employment and culture but also for transportation. For example, all rail lines go through Roma Street Station in Brisbane’s city center. A current discussion in Queensland concerns whether SEQ ought to be conceived as a “200-kilometer city.” In fact, neither model provides a sustainable future. We propose a shift in perception from a Brisbane-centered view to a network model in which a system of many interconnected but different centers distribute employment and residential activities. With careful delineation of terrain that is off-limits for development (such as floodplains, wetlands, steep slopes, and mountains), this network allows households to locate close to employment opportunities, reducing loads on an increasingly strained road system. Additionally, the distribution of economic, intellectual, cultural, and social capital raises the general level of civic quality for all. 1 Approved Plan: Pattern of approved and planned subdivisions suggests an asphaltcovered future 2 Proposed Coomera Plan: Transportation parking and private auto routes are clustered and curtailed, helping to encourage transit use. Car sharing and cooperative ownership schemes encouraged. 3 Approved Plan: provides few, segregated job opportunities. 4 Proposed Coomera Plan: Mixed use adjacency and superimposition of employment, housing, shopping, recreation and transportation creates vibrant communities 5 Car West End 6 Proposed Transit Routes REGIONAL BUS LOCAL BUS LOOP CROSSTOWN BUS
7 Proposed Coomera Plan: looking Beyond Borders The ormeau rail station immediately north of Coomera presents an opportunity to create a system of centers 8 Approved Plan: allows considerable development of steep slopes, floodplains, and good-quality agricultural land 9 Proposed Coomera Plan: Ecology Except for the marine industry precinct, ecologically fragile landscapes are held off-limits to development DEvELOPED TERRAIN AGRICULTURAL TERRAIN STEEP SLOPES FLOOD PLAIN
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as both alive and inert. To say elements are inert, but that the earth and our bodies— composed of minerals—are alive, seems not only simplistic but conflicted. Just look up the components of a human body: oxygen (65%), carbon (18%), hydrogen (10%), nitrogen (3%), calcium (1.5%), phosphorus (1.0%), potassium (0.35%), sulfur (0.25%), sodium (0.15%), and magnesium (0.05%); that’s only the first ten elements. Current definitions of what constitutes life seems primitive; they lack appreciation for life’s sustaining systems, minerals, molecular forces, and importantly, the understanding of nonlinear, emergent phenomena situating life as process and design and making as a part of genetic life. In this perspective monadic immanence— becoming—as pieced together from Deleuze, Leibniz, Dawkins, and Whitehead holds conceptual strands that, braided together, result in a lifeline of compounded individual ideas woven to guide being in nature at a time when we have poisoned much of it.
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The social construction of a nature where some parts are alive and some are dead is no longer a workable hypothesis; furthermore, calling parts of nature inert carries heavy, negative social, political, and theological connotations. If the environment is the membrane, material, and force of life, ideas such as dead materials and waste products become as obscene as environmental ravaging and species genocide. Ideas to Objects Some thoughts driving physical design resolve in object-making using nature’s elements— ideas-to-things results. Making tools, pots, knots, and fabric (the earliest known craft products) aided humans’ development of agriculture simultaneous with shelter building. In this line of evolutionary conjecture, the results of craft and building cross-stimulated each other. A plantlike drawing of city building and architecture based on this outline might then look something like growing roots overlaying a network of neural pathways created when thought, ideas, craft, and materials meet, illustrating ideas physically realized in shelters, buildings, and cities (or cars, airplanes, and iPods).
PROPOSAL CU 153
The first buildings were thought/idea/hand extensions of the environment and the builders’ needs. These first buildings, akin to other living organism’s evolved nests, hives, and burrows, may therefore be understood as genetic/cultural expressions, extended phenotypes, as we have learned from Dawkins. Furthermore, it is conceivable that craft processes such as weaving and mud works were biomimetically learned; that our designing ancestors extrapolated from animal and insect shelters. The usefulness of placing planning and architecture in a direct
2005 brisbane Airport
HORIZONTAL SKYSCRAPERS IN BRISBANE Yuichiro Yamaguchi
In Brisbane, inbound airline flow is increasing rapidly in tandem with the growth in Brisbane’s population: Airline passenger volume is expected to double in the next eight years and the population will become seven times bigger than its current size in 50 years. As a result, two threats will jeopardize the city’s structure: airport isolation and the city’s stagnant condition in the future. Regarding the airport isolation, many international cities have faced unbalanced situations recently, for example Atlanta and Amsterdam, with a resultant loss of business opportunities. The downtown areas of cities were once developed to allow direct inbound flow to the regional train stations, etc., but the more recent trend towards airport development located in suburbs, along with the growth in passenger trade and its associated logistics, has tended to decentralize the structure of cities. The growth of big, remote “airport cities” has drained the downtown areas of their competitiveness. As a result, cities get weak even as the flow of people to the cities increases. Also, the stagnant situation in cities like Detroit makes many international cities economically weak due to a lack of any strategic development plan in key locations in the city, which causes incessant traffic jams and makes the city stagnate. I would like to propose the notion of the “horizontal skyscraper” as an alternative management system. This system enables the cities’ downtown areas to prosper again with continuing “continental” structure between the airport and the CBD, and will allow a smooth flow into and within the city. Public transportation systems will run horizontally inside the horizontal skyscraper, just as elevators run vertically in a normal skyscraper. This project’s budget will be $10 billion USD over 50 years, but this investment will become profitable after this major infrastructure improvement is completed, creating a large number of economic opportunities.
evolutionary line via extended phenotypes and monadic immanence, as well as giving them a foundation in genetic expression, is relevant to perceptions of new design-biologies and technologies, and may be fundamental for reconstructing an appreciation of the environment. If architecture, planning, and design can be reconceived as natural extensions of humans, and if they can be seen as elements of nature, the development of cultural, environmentally synthesized biodesign might face fewer social and political dead ends. With social and political support, information from plant and animal morphology, embedded computation, growing, and synthetic biology become concepts as well as tools referencing nature and grafting design into it. The Emerging Bio-Design Studio If we think of bioarchitecture/design/planning as hybrid processes, for example involving plants, algae, fungi, and bacteria, then agriculture is an allied field. It can teach design professions from its experience ranging from home gardening, hydroponics, indoor growing, bioremediation, and plant genetics for immediate action. Complex and long-term research, involving genetics or biomimetic experimentation, for, say, leaf-like functions, lichen or bacteria surfaces, or seashell-strong materials requires laboratory organization with program and performance goals. Research of this type is not understood by most design professions and will need nurturing and growing time. Laboratory research will be difficult to integrate, organize, and interpret, but it is precisely in integrating this information from nature and science where design and design education has failed to keep pace and needs to be addressed now. Learning to check out materials from nature’s library is essential: Connecting ways for organizing total recycling while incorporating biological hybridization and function is part of design’s future. From such a braided matrix I think a new type of design studio is emerging and that it is not a nice idea; it’s a critical need.
PROPOSAL CU 155
In my mostly one-person studio, I use microscopes, garden experiments (to study pea tendrils as connecting systems), and Xfrog, a plant-growing software I pair with Rhino and 3DS Max. Just as I send files out for STL model building, when I need advanced technology, I contact local medical imaging facilities or labs with a scanning electron microscope. This inventory of my bare-bones studio illustrates that design and experimentation can begin with basic equipment. In noting this, I’m trying to emphasize that the first steps for growing bioarchitecture do not rely on equipment; they rely on growing ideas and extending those ideas into design as part of nature. They rely on monadic immanence.