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4.2.1 IaaC Lecture Series : Synthetic Biology in Design Mitchell Joachim
IaaC Lecture Series: Synthetic Biology in Design (IaaC Lecture Series 28th April 2014; synopsis by Jordi Vivaldi)
Following the title of one of the most famous movies of Sergio Leone, we could classify designs in 3 categories: The good, the bad, and the ugly. In the case of the “ugly”, design is mainly trying to be “pretty”: it is about giving the best to produce an image. The “bad”, instead, it’s above all a celebration of the author’s ego: the signature is the crucial value of this work. Finally, in the first case, the good, to design equals to invent. You don’t just design a parking machine but what you do is to rethink how parkings work. In this sense, architecture and urbanism both work in a similar way, and for this reason there are no repetitive answers. If you ask “What is a smart city?” to 10 people, you will get 10 different answers. Actually, smart city is a concept that has been capital along centuries, with its different cultural understandings, and one of them is the current capitalist one, mainly related to a corporative idea. However, there is a newer notion to define what is a smart city: a city based on health, full of networks supplying connectivity and injected by nature. If in the 1776 we were mainly surrounded by early village settlements, and in 2010 we have an industrial model based on the automobile and services, in the 2100 the aim is to have a green city. But not a green city in the sense of having greenery and picnics, but in the sense of productivity: food, air quality, water, energy... This prediction puts on the table the notion of utopia. Every society along time and space questions what could be a better place to live, and to this respect the concept of utopia is an incredible tool to think the future and redefine our lifes. But to get closer to utopia, you need to research. In this sense, we can differentiate in two basic forms of research. On the one hand the composers: you take a little of violin, a little of guitar... and you make a composition. On the second hand the diggers: they are Cover - Smart City Farm, Terreform Figure 1 - Mitchell Joachim lecturing at IaaC, IaaC Archive 2
extremely specific, and they know so much about their specific topic of research that they can only speak among them. And to end up with a fruitful research, you need both: you need to dig and you need to compose. In our case, once we were asked to think about the future of the car. We made the question bigger, and we rethought the whole system of mobility while we were very specific and deep in our car prototype. This car model is isodirectional: wheels and cabin rotate 360 degrees. The vehicle has a frame that permits the car to stand up and therefore reduce its step in order to be stacked. Finally it is completely closed but has a aperture point that tracks your vision and open the cap. Is a car design to fit the city, instead of fitting the city to the car as it was in the 20 century. They are designed even to shock with people without killing them: they are not made out of metal anymore but of many inflable plastics.
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Another topic in which we are deeply involved has to do with the urban farming, were we have many projects going on. At the end, what we are doing is defining a new class, as Richard Florida suggests, and in this sense we have a position that is the result of a combinations in between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. The first one was more a community activist, an ecologist and plebeian worker, while Robert Moses was a Planner, a visionary and a partisan. A combination of both would give also a figure like Frederick Law Olmsted, a urbanist that cared about everything: lanscape, architecture, urbanism... A personage that could be defined by the word “urbaneer�. The point of them is that their urban spaces were not productive: they are green and open surfaces, but they are not dealing with waste, food, energy, water... For this reason we started a project called Brooklyn 2100. It is performative and parametric, although the starting point is polemic. It is changing the notion of cities to a configuration that has no specific center. If cathedrals were occupying this position in the past, and now big skyscrapers are doing the same offering to the city a capitalist center, our project is not offering one single center but many. Actually, the main problem is that this is a project that no one asked for. We just did it. We need people that are taking initiative, that is not just waiting for the government to receive a request. And specially, what is important are the ideas that a designer generates, rather than
Figure 2 - Fab Tree Hab, Terreform One Figure 3 - Fab Tree Hab, Terreform One Figure 4 - Car Prototype, Terreform ONe
the design science by itself. If for example, materials are able to change or modify themselves in their life span, does it mean that architecture will still be static in the future? It actually makes no sense that having materials that are evolving, mutating, disappearing, reacting etc in time, architecture is still being though through old paradigms. The question that we have to put ourselves when we discover these dynamic materials is: what kind of architecture is related to it? With what I would call “materiality awareness�, things are not there forever, but follow a natural cycle that could deeply change our notions of design, process and aesthetics that somehow are still too attached to the idea of permanence. Because now, we know how to manipulate nature, that is to say, how to control and embed its processes into our artificial materials. It is well known that the relation in between nature and architecture is nothing new, but it is not more that 10 years that synthetic biology is part of the dialogue with architecture. Even if for example Greg Lynn was using biology and nature for his designs, he didn’t had access to a fully functional bio-lab, and therefore he was mainly using computers to mimic biology. It means that he was mainly copying it instead of producing a living material as we are trying to develop now. In this sense, now we can experiment with a house that can die, and then you grow up another one, or with a material that can reproduce by itself according to certain conditions. Cases like these ones are experiments that, no doubts, will radically change the way we think and produce architecture.
Figure 5 - Brooklyn 2100, Terreform One Figure 6 - Brooklyn 2100, Terreform One 8
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