Protocell Architecture

Author(s) : Neill Spiller, Rachel Armstrong
ISBN: 9780470748282
136 pages
March 2011
Price: US $40.00 Buy this issue

Protocell Architecture

Throughout the ages architects have attempted to capture the essence of living systems as design inspiration. However, practitioners of the built environment have had to deal with a fundamental split between the artificial urban landscape and nature owing to a technological 'gap' that means architects have been unable to make effective use of biological systems in urban environments. Protocell Architecture is an edition of AD that shows for the first time that contemporary architects can create and construct architectures that are bottom up, synthetically biological, green and have no recourse to shallow bio-mimicry. In the next few decades, synthetic biology is set to have as much, if not more, impact on architecture as cyberspace and the digital. The key to these amazing architectural innovations is the Protocell.

* Contributors include:
Rachel Armstrong
Martin Hanczyc
Lee Cronin
Mark Morris

* Architects include:
Neil Spiller
Nic Clear
IwamotoScott
Paul Preissner
Omar Khan
Dan Slavinsky
Philip Beesley
Neri Oxman

Editorial
Helen Castle

About the Guest-Editors
Neil Spiller and Rachel Armstrong

Spotlight
Visual highlights of the issue

Introduction - It’s a Brand New Morning
Neil Spiller and Rachel Armstrong

Structure and the Synthesis of Life
Martin M. Hanczyc

Defining New Architectural Design Principles with ‘Living’ Inorganic Materials
Leroy Cronin
Cronin pioneers a fundamentally new approach to materials, scaling up from the nanoscale.

Dream a Little Dream
Mark Morris

An Architectural Chemistry
Omar Khan

Protocells: The Universal Solvent
Neil Spiller

How Protocells Can Make ‘Stuff’ Much More Interesting
Rachel Armstrong

Soil and Protoplasm: The Hylozoic Ground project
Philip Beesley and Rachel Armstrong

Authorship at Risk: The Role of the Architect
Dan Slavinsky

Proto-Design: Architecture’s Primordial Soup and the Quest for Units of Synthetic Life
Neri Oxman
Oxman explores how material properties are a potent intermediary for the built environment.

Back to the Future
Paul Preissner

Line Array: Protocells as Dynamic Structure
IwamotoScott Architecture (Lisa Iwamoto)

AVATAR and the Politics of Protocell Architecture
Nic Clear

Counterpoint - Bettering Biology?
Bill Watts

The Argument

Bill Watts

Counterargument: Bettering Biology?

Protocell engineering is a great idea but nature is doing it already very well.Enter text here

Read on

Protocell engineering is a great idea but nature is doing it already very well. Evolution has, albeit very slowly and through a process of serendipity and chance, produced an impressive array of highly complex self assembly systems that can perform a huge range of functions, and can even think. From the evidence of protocell engineering, we appear to be at the primordial slime point on the R&D curve. I realise that you have to start somewhere. I suggest that we start at the other end of figuring out how the biology around us works rather than re-inventing it. This work is going on at the moment in highly funded medical and agricultural research labs all over the world, driven by the immediate human needs of health and nutrition. We designers in the built environment cannot hope to get such levels of research funding so we need to hang around the doors of the research labs that are sequencing genomes, sorting out how cancer works, and rebuilding hearts, to pick up enough information so that we can design our own living buildings that we can in-turn live in.

Neil Spiller, Rachel Armstrong

Argument: Protocell Architecture

Read on

Protocell architecture poses a challenge to existing paradigms in the practice of the built environment by virtue of the unique properties of the protocell, a life-like chemical agent that generates building materials using a non-biological, bottom-up approach to construction. Although protocells are not biological they share the same language as nature through the laws of physics and chemistry. This opens up the possibility of communication between artifice and environment that is capable of creating positive environmental changes and is orchestrated, rather than controlled, through the processes of cultivation. By necessity these exciting explorations are the result of interdisciplinary research, which is reflected in a wide range of contributing experts including architects, historians, theorists and scientists to provide some of the sense of discovery of this new terrain. Protocell technology is native to the 21st century and likely to define it and striking at the core of the current dominant ideologies and tyrannical dogmas about the nature of architectural practice.

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I bow down humbly in the presence of such geratenss. 15 Oct 11, 04:30

I bow down humbly in the presence of such geratenss.

Protocell Architecture