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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