Into the age of the ecological human
Back in 2012, I had a long and stimulating conversation with Rachel Armstrong aka @livingarchitect on a wide range of topics, yet it all centers around the imminent — and necessary — deep paradigm shift from a mechanistic to an ecological worldview, a topic near and dear to me. Sit back and enjoy …
Nik Baerten (Pantopicon): The famous quote of Le Corbusier saying “The house is a machine for living in” takes on a whole new meaning as our notion of a machine is changing, as we move from a mechanistic to a more organic interpretation of systems. In your view of next-generation architecture as that of programming protocells to grow (into) a structure, a building, both the notion of what a building is and that of the art of building, i.e. architecture, changes profoundly. How would you describe that change?
Rachel (Armstrong): Architecture is a fundamentally social phenomenon. It’s not primarily ‘about’ the building. Buildings and other structures produced by architects are manifestations of how people live and shape their environment. Modern architecture has been institutionalized by commerce and the state, which has become the architect’s master and has emphasized the idea of ‘property’, ‘objects’ and ‘iconography’ as commodity. So I just want to assert that architecture is not about ‘the object’ or ‘the building’ but is the material ‘imprint,’ in some ways the environmental ‘relief’ that is shaped by people, their social interactions cultures and beliefs. The ‘next generation’ architecture, as it were, is the manifestation of how a new set of tools, technologies, beliefs (environmentalism/nature), materials and communications systems (global/complex) shape our proximate spaces that co-evolve with us.
All that is built squirms ...
This is the fundamental reality that applies to buildings. Also, architecture is a process of succession rather than an act of construction, like the production of soils. I imagine these transitions from our current object-centered forms of manufacturing to becoming process –led.
Nik: From an underlying philosophical point of view, process philosophies/worldviews like the ones of A.N. Whitehead & the likes come to mind.
Rachel: Yes, definitely — I like the fundamental premise of process philosophy, which relates to systems rather than objects and which engages with the Heraclitean notion of nothing being permanent, everything being in a continual state of flux — also Henri Bergson.
Their systems are embryological in nature — perhaps proto-embryological. I’m interested in the possibilities embodied in the Origins of Life sciences that discuss the transition from inert to living matter. Of particular interest to me is the relationship between the inorganic and organic world. Very simply speaking ‘inorganic’ chemistry does not contain ‘carbon’ and is confined to minerals while ‘organic’ chemistry is carbon containing. The history of the inorganic and organic dichotomy is based in alchemy where the application of heat to a substance would be reversible if applied to inorganic substances — which did not contain a ‘vital’ essence — and irreversible when directed at organic substances — since its vitality would be denatured. Practically speaking the mineral world brings a kind of geometric order and rigidity that creates strength and fixedness, while organic structures are flexible and robust.
In the built environment we have a clash of infrastructures between the rigid mechanical infrastructures of modern architecture and the flexible networks of the natural world. My research takes a bottom-up approach to how to best use materials to engage the intersections of these spaces and work using the principles of succession — the progressive colonization of a space/habitat by life-forms that are increasingly adapted to that space — to literally, grow materials and architectural interventions into our urban environment. As such, the process itself is symbiotic not a totalitarian invasion or razing to the ground of what already exists but takes a strategic approach in which new structures are wrapped around old ones, rather like biological evolution itself.
The tools of production of these buildings are interwoven with nature through the new science of synthetic biology, which is the science and engineering of living processes. Synthetic biology enables the development of ‘living’ materials by harnessing the process of nature, where the systems that support life can be regarded as a technology. These ‘living technologies’ share ‘the same language’ of as natural systems through the frameworks of complexity and the processes of emergence. Living technologies are capable of harnessing natural forces to address design and engineering challenges in new ways that can even forge connections between ontologically different substrates such as, computer hard drives grown from tiny magnets by bacteria (see also here), or produce electricity in battery cells. These technologies bring new challenges to the design and engineering portfolios, as they possess agency, need sustenance, have a will of their own and change with time.
Living materials require us to examine our understanding of matter, technology, life and even our understanding of reality. The categories and distinctions that we have conventionally conferred on natural systems since the Enlightenment may need reconsideration.
Perhaps it is necessary that in an age of scientific ‘omes’ — which refer to the capacities of chemical systems to act in the course of biological development such as, the genome (genes) and proteome (proteins) — there is a need to bring forth a mineral-ome so that we can apprehend its agency.
The hallmark of bottom-up forms of construction are that they are shaped by the actions and desires of people, communities and civilizations rather than being enforced upon them like containers to constrain their lives by the economic forces that drive property developers and town planners. Networks of dynamic systems, which are intrinsically sensitive to their environment and their inhabitants, forge their fabrics.
One key defining quality of this transition in the production of this kind of architecture is time. It shapes relevance into the process of building so that architecture may always be niche-specific and ‘fit for purpose’. In this way it does not exhibit the inevitable redundancy of building objects that are hurled obliviously into natural environments by the current machine-based construction processes that are disconnected from their surroundings.
I don’t think that ‘machines’ are changing in any particularly profound way, although they are definitely more sophisticated. But in terms of their fundamental organizational principles machines come from the same ontological roots whether they are a combustion engine or a mobile phone. What is changing is the framework for the production of technology. Machines are conceived of in a Cartesian existence framework and as such, have fundamental rules of organization that govern their performance. For example, machines exist in an object-centered hierarchical reality that is effectively dualistic. In a mechanical, industrial age the idea of technology and the machine have become synonymous but they are not. Technology is a much larger set of instruments than that of machines. My personal definition of technology is that it is the way the mind becomes embodied in the process of problem solving. So an Egyptian vulture throwing a stone to break open an ostrich egg is making use of a kind of technology.
Protocells embody a technology that is conceived of within a framework of complexity that is based on the organizational principles of network interactions, connectivity, robustness, flexibility, the capacity to surprise and the ability to deal with unpredictability.
While the metaphor of a Cartesian organizational system is the machine, the organizational metaphor for complexity is ecology.
An architectural ‘ecology’ speaks of networks and systems as integral to its organization and therefore draws on an understanding of complexity. The particular kind of complexity that I am using is not abstracted but an embodied engagement, with things that connect with others in a material context. This is where the re-reading of materiality is necessary. We currently view the world in dualistic terms where those that are ascribed the status of being ‘alive’ act and those that do not have this status remain quiet and do not participate. My ecological engagement with architecture aims to engage a spectrum of materials and ecologies that participate as a whole, even if some of their agencies are not bestowed with the status of ‘life’. In this way I draw from Jane Bennett’s notion of vibrant materiality, which gives back agency to ‘things’, which participate in the natural and human realms with a ‘force’ of their own. “It doesn’t make sense to me to say we are “simply” our materiality — there is nothing simple about materiality, and neither are material forces and flows best figured as determinate and deterministic. The need to be kind and respectful to other bodies will remain, regardless of whether one understands human individuals and groups as embodied minds/souls or as complex materialities.” (from an interview with Jane Bennett)
So at the root of engagement with a new organizational system within the practice of the built environment, a revaluation of materiality is key to its production and ability to accommodate and respond to its human, and non-human inhabitants.
Nik: In a way, that could be in part considered a ‘re-animation’ of (as in: breathing life into) the non-living world surrounding us. As such, that would be interesting food for thought for anthropologists. What could we learn from other cultures in this respect? Think of the many indigenous cultures in which the ‘magical’ has not been eradicated from their phenomenology of the world, from their cultural vocabulary. In a way, they still actively engage with an animated version of the material dimension of their world. How do you look at the role and influence of the world’s cultures in the shifts you describe?
Rachel: The difference between ‘vibrant materiality’ (to quote Bennett) and cultures that understand the world is ‘animated’ or ‘vitalised’ through the spirit world — is that the former does not require the attachment of an ephemeral force to matter such as élan vital (cf. Bergson) or entelechy, but exists within the material itself as a primordial quality. It is not separate to matter, but fundamentally part of it. In this way I actually disagree with Bennett’s take on a resurgence of vitalisms, these are not necessary in the context of complex systems. Complexity’s molecular interactions and networks counters the tradiational Cartesian dualisms of science, which can never resolve mind/matter and therefore never truly renounce the Christian god (note that Dawkins vs. The creationists is described by James Shapiro in the Boston Review ‘the third way’ as a ‘dialogue of the deaf’!) by invoking ‘agency’ within matter. In that way, I’d say these materialisms are derivative of Spinosa but imbued with Hume’s secularism — so that matter ‘speaks’ for itself and not through a deity, external force or some kind of mind. ‘Vibrant materiality’ is closer to Vernadsky than Gaia — (which associates itself with disembodied ‘consciousness’, a secular, ephemeral force) and in that way (from Vernadsky’s Russian origins) — if you’re looking for cultures that engage with a dynamic material world that possesses its own agency, then it is possible to say there are aspects of gnosticism (where the material world is created through an intermediary being rather than directly by a god) in ‘vibrant materiality’. For example, the Jewish culture’s (kabbalistic) mythology of the golem, whose animated materiality comes directly from clay. So I guess, the answer to your question is our lessons would come from practices within ‘gnostic’ cultures.
Nik: In the whole discourse on sustainability this could lead to interesting new pathways, open up new ethical dimensions as well, as the material world gains in identity. How would it change the way in which we address the mineral world, the world of ores, of non-living natural resources?
Rachel: These are important questions.
When it comes to considering the cultural implications of ‘vibrant materiality’ there are two aspects to consider concurrently. The first is an objective view of the matter itself — what relationships and topologies exist between living and non-living materials. For example, gold can act as a catalyst for a reaction without being changed at the end of the process — yet it has contributed to the ‘liveliness’ of the system. From a scientific perspective we can observe and measure those kinds of processes but there is another set of connections and relationships that cannot be readily measured. These are cultural attributes that are embedded in networks of meaning. So gold as a catalyst has meaning in that for example, it can convert poisonous carbon monoxide to the less noxious greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, therefore it can be valued as a detoxifying agent and in a certain context, this may have its own kind of currency. Of course, other kinds of value could be attributed to the process but the point I’m making is that networks of interactions have both empirical and semantic attributes. So, when considering the mineral world it is not simply about the way that molecular interactions connect temporally and spatially so they impact on cultures and communities but there are networks of meaning that are culturally shaped through these communities, which cannot be deduced from an objective assessment of the matter they’re comprised of. Perhaps the most intense scenario in which the meaning of materials is changed in a social context, is when resources become limited such as, a space faring colony on a world ship.
Here the importance of each agent (living or non-living) participating in vital networks of interaction becomes shaped by the impact of the agent on the society.
In resource constrained contexts, meaning is more profound and changes its value.
For example, in the case of gold as a catalyst, its detoxification role may be so important for the lives of many people in the space faring society that if a person was to remove it, they would be denying the society a vital function. The penalty therefore may be more severe than would be deemed appropriate in a resource-abundant terrestrial context since that person has caused networks of damage to others and not simply selfishy remove something with an abstract monetary value.
Nik: The envisioned shifts in agency, also make one wonder about legal systems and new constitutions, e.g. like in Ecuador & Bolivia where the rights of Mother Nature have been inscribed in or at least impacted the constitution. How would the system (need to) evolve in this ecological, non human-centric world?
Rachel: Essentially systems will remain the same, governed by the laws of physics and chemistry of our planet. However, the interpretation of the meaning, its social importance and cultural adjustments will be made to accomodate shifts in our belief systems. The example I gave just now about a space faring colony in a state of resource constraint is extreme, but there are equivalent scenarios already taking place around the world with famines (North Korea) and droughts (Yemen, Pakistan) that are leading to conflict — context therefore really matters. With an object centred cultural bias we value things in absolute terms in the absensce of any context, with ‘process philosophy’ or a ‘complex’ systems view where attention is paid to context since this can enrich connections and networks, then this kind of fundamental shift in perception could lead to radical cultural changes (and in truth, it already does — just think about the food wasteful Western societies with garbage cans full of left-overs and the famine wrought areas of the world — attitudes towards scarcity, shape value). However, as our understanding of scarcity increases and helps precipitate shifts in the valuation of ‘matter’ (livign or non-living) and its contribution to our healthy lives, further shifts in ideology may persuade us that we are not living in a condition of scarcity, but of abundance — which is a much happier state of existence. Peter Diamandis looks to abundance on the number of human minds that will be online in the coming decades, who he perceives as being essential in helping solve some of our greatest challenges. Indeed the whole ‘recycling’ market is also based on the idea of waste as an abundant resource that can be utilised and marketed, again, shifting the value of ‘garbage’ that has already been discarded on first social pass as valueless.
Nik: The ever inspiring Marshall McLuhan had this wonderful phrase: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”. How do you expect the technologies that you are describing and developing, to change not merely the way we build our environment, but how we live in it? How do you think our patterns of interaction with our built environment, with nature, with each other might be reshaped under the influence of this paradigm shift? How might they reshape the human condition?
Rachel: My view of architecture is that it is fundamentally about co-evolution of human communities with their environment and the systems and structures that are produced as a consequence of these relationships. Richard Lewontin notes that organisms and their environments co-evolve. It is actually not the materiality itself that changes fundamentally (although through Prigogine’s notion of time’s arrow of creativity, matter complexifies in a direction and therefore inevitably and irreversibly changes as time progresses) but the way that we relate to and interpret change. For example, currently we view buildings as being static, permanent objects. After a while bacteria, dirt and lichen colonize their exteriors, so we set out to clean the surfaces. If our understanding of dynamic materialities is adopted we will view the inevitable progression of natural systems into inert spaces to transform them into habitats that support more life forms so perhaps we will not clean them, perhaps we will encourage them, garden them and harvest their produce which may, for example, clean the air of pollutants or simply be regarded as a dynamic patterning system and an aesthetic feature of the building.
We are making a transition from being ‘Machine Humans’ to ‘Ecological Humans’.
The nature of humanity in the twenty-first century is, according to sociologist Steve Fuller, a ‘bipolar disorder’ beset with dualisms of identification such as divine/animal, mind/body, nature/artifice and individual/social.
He notes that they have challenged our collective sense of identity as ‘human’, particularly though the operationalization of the mind/body question in new material configurations of metallic or silicon bodies.
In short, we imagine ourselves in terms of mechanical frameworks and collectively, we consider the ultimate existence paradigm is to embody a Cartesian uploadable mind and upgradable body. Ray Kurtzweil’s ‘The Singularity is Near’ embodied this aspiration to transcend the ‘human’ condition to ‘become’ immortal, like machines.
This ‘machine thinking’ has characterized the twentieth century and its implications are profound. We imagine ourselves to be machines. We create our solutions in our own image through industrial manufacturing processes and even what we think that our own capabilities are.
But at the start of the twenty-first century a set of conditions related to the realization of toll that the impact of this machine thinking is taking on our future — through environmental destruction, pollution and an adversarial relationship with nature — facilitated through the complex networks embodied in the digital age — is prompting the emergence of a new paradigm — The Age of Complexity, which more colloquially can be thought of an Ecological Paradigm.
Nik: As you mention that, I am also reminded of architect Kisho Kurokawa’s description (in the 80s-90s) of a shift from the Age of the Machine to the Age of Life in his book “The Philosophy of Symbiosis”.
Rachel: Neat! Although I would extend this beyond Kurokawa’s cultural symbiosis to the literal erosion between building and landscape and even building and nature. Some of the most amazing juxtapositions I’ve seen are in Nikko, with its Shinto temples and dramatic natural landscapes of woodlands, waterfalls and hot springs. My feeling is that up until now most architecture has talked figuratively about a relationship with nature through metaphor, or formalism — because the construction paradigms are grounded in industrial construction processes — and I’m very keen to extend the relationship with nature to a much more literal engagement with its various materialities … with hints of the culture of ‘ruins’ where buildings are meant to change, decay and be re-appropriated (see the above example of inert building objects being colonized by lichen and bacteria) — not just for humans but for a whole host of other life-forms and living systems too!
So, if we thought of ourselves as ‘machines’ in the twentieth century — are we thinking of ourselves as ‘Ecological Humans’ in the twenty first century? And if so, then what does this mean?
Our bodies are not only human flesh and genetic code. Around 90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial yet weigh only three to five kilogrammes as they are much smaller than human cells.
Nik: Which reminds me of Lewis Thomas once calling us humans “giant taxis for bacteria to get around in safely” (cf. also Lynn Margulis’ theory of endosymbiosis).
Rachel: Totally! There was a recent essay in the Economist looking at the scientific evidence about how our mood, our weight and our immune systems are actually shaped by bacteria!!
Modern biotechnology has recently revealed that humans are immersed in a bacterial world. So much so, that an alien naturalist might consider humans as little more than smart city housing for bacterial colonies. While we think we are at the top of an evolutionary tree, it appears that our evolution is closely linked to, if not entirely dependent on bacteria. They have collectively made it possible for complex life forms to exist as they have produced our breathable atmosphere, our soil and even our rainfall. Although they have not been proven to possess a collective ‘mind’ they do have extremely sophisticated methods of communicating using linguistic qualities. They encircle the planet like a chemical Internet and hold incessant conversations using physics and chemistry.
Bacteria are resilient, agile and smart. Some cure cancer, some eat poison and others can resist extreme conditions and still, we think of bacteria as being primitive life forms.
Yet no matter how simple we think they are, they have incredible technological powers. Bacteria don’t use tools as such, since their technologies are extrusions plucked from their own bodies. For example, bacteria can give themselves new powers by self-modifying their genes to produce bioluminescence, swarming behaviours or architectural biofilms.
Bacteria outnumber our human cells 10:1. Our natural microbiome is an essential part of our immune system, warding off bacteria’s more invasive relatives that might cause us harm. Through the new lens of biotechnology we are becoming aware that we share our most intimate spaces with bacteria, which has opened up newly discovered landscapes that are rich with technological opportunities. Jessica Green studies the bacterial profiles of our living spaces to improve our health and well-being, while Philips has proposed that bacteria could help us save energy by powering home lighting systems. Sonja Baumel has explored the idea of using bacteria to form a decorative garment around her body that responds to her surroundings like photophores, the bacteria-rich camouflage cells found on deep sea creatures.
Yet our relationship with bacteria is still more personal than this. Our own cells show contemporary and historic evidence that we are assemblages of non-human ancestors that include viruses, prion and mitochondria (the cell organ responsible for producing energy). This molecular entwining between humans and bacteria raises the possibility of augmenting the human body by manipulating our bacteria instead of our own flesh. Futurist Ian Pearson speculates that through advances in genetic technologies the human species will diversify and give rise to bacteria sapiens. Yet we may already have passed that threshold, as we’re not in control of this newly discovered micro-miniature world that encircles us on a planetary scale. Next nature acknowledges the messiness of our biological origins and the ultimate connectedness of all species. It seeks to develop better communications between every life form — rather than engaging in an all-out antibiotic boundary war that we’re simply not going to win.
Our identities, being locally entangled with our micro flora are also interwoven with our surroundings and habitats that are shared by plants and animals for which we depend on for food — which we share with our intestinal flora. Yet these networks of connection are not unlimited when it comes to our self/identification. We edit them culturally by attributing certain systems as having value and others as being extraneous to our needs. We subjectively distinguish ourselves from the natural world by ‘editing’ our networks through the process of making garbage. We choose what is important to us by applying cultural, rather than material criteria, which does not lend itself to empirical measurement. Turing had already grasped the importance of personal bias in dealing with complex systems and devised the ‘Imitation Game’ to address the conundrum of intelligence, which evaded an easy empirical solution. This is now more popularly know as the ‘Turing Test’ and is now being used more widely to fathom complex systems and to identify ‘life’. The flow and structure of information within our environment is of vital importance in establishing just exactly what is technology, what is garbage and what is ‘life’. The issue here is how can we ‘prove’ meaning? Currently we do not have the right tools, materials and methods that enable us to ask the ‘why’ questions that Aristotle was so fond of, and which could be most revealing in this context.
In this context Ecological Humans will construct their cities according to these principles of environmental connection and cultural editing of intrinsic relationships. Currently our urban design and development practices work within the framing of modernism, which positions humans at the centre of existence that prioritises the status of objects and operates through the technology of machines. The processes engaged by modernism involve the simplification of systems to command their obedience, without any ideological commitment to return something in exchange for their servitude.
In modern cities we have delegated their development to planners, architects and engineers, assigning roles to people, as one would identify parts of a machine. Consequently architecture is productised and exported as ready to inhabit buildings, or pre-packaged modular units that are exported all over the world. Modern architecture has become a kind of giant gadget — perhaps, in the not too distant future, every city will even have it’s own ‘app’. Recently, Pegasus Global Holdings has proposed a Centre for Innovation Testing and Evaluation, a full-size city without inhabitants to become a huge research facility where scientists can conduct urban scale experiments. Examples cited include the testing of non-lethal weapons.
In my view, this kind of proposal is the embodiment of modernism at its most absurd. How much of this pre-fabricated infrastructure is going to end up in our landfills? This seems a deeply depersonalised view of the way that we live and to identify a different system that may be able to underpin architectural construction. Cities cannot be meaningfully recognized by their parts — they function as whole — and their character is emergent being co-authored by its communities. Cities are being robbed of their relationship to people and reduced into modular, meaningless items.
Cities are not machines for living in — despite what Le Corbusier’s doctrine insists. They are much more magical and strange than that. Cities are about people. As such, they cannot be ‘solved’, productized or homogenized.
Cities are about people that need to be engaged in culturally beneficial exchanges between individuals, communities, societies and nations. A city is a place you want to live in, grow up in, fall in love in, see your family thrive in and when you pass on, you will bestow it with traces of your life that remain entangled in its fabric. After all — it is your city.
Nik: How would you deal with the notion of heritage in the ecological city? Would it still be the buildings as such or the cell-lines on which they are based?
Rachel: Really interesting question! Again this is where culture and networks of meaning become just as influential, if not more important, than the actual molecules themselves. It really would depend on how these lineages were defined and valued … and definitions are not exactly an easy thing to do! I have recently been mapping out a cosmology of protocell forms, relating them to complexity and the passage of time and with every ‘configuration’ that I come across I am trying to classify them into different groups. This process has actually made me think about the subjectivity of this task and how our whole notions of classification are shaped by predominant ideas about the world — then we structure what we experience to fit our preconceptions …. I can’t see us changing this fundamental prejudice, to recapitulate what we believe to be true by re-organising the world around us, so it will all depend on the ambient culture … We also have a great challenge that has been left us by a highly commercialized and productized world in that we have lost the ability to design across generations. We expect completion times to take place certainly within a single life-time, perhaps the varied speeds of change with living materials — some lichens for example will give an accurate idea of time by their diameter and it may take a hundred years for them to reach ten centimetres … so we may need to change the way that we conceive of design that it’s not just a product but a life-experience in which we are continually engaged and which changes alongside us. The idea of heritage itself from a biological perspective is also incredibly anthropocentrically biased. Only a relatively small number of animals reproduce sexually.
Most creatures on this planet are simple organisms such as bacteria that actually swap their DNA almost as a kind of currency.
They don’t need to ‘conjugate’ to reproduce so this swapping of genetic material as ‘lateral gene transfer’ is a form of horizontal descent, which will help increase biodiversity in these creatures and is responsible for the spread of traits such as, antibiotic resistance. So since only a relatively few number of organisms reproduced through vertical heritage, should our idea of ‘heritability’ change — especially since such a large part of our own biology is bacterial? Indeed the anthropocentric nature of ‘heritage’ may need to be questioned — what is the legacy that bacteria leave behind us in our cities? Is our health, and our lives being shaped by bacterial landscapes? Research into our architectural biome is being carried out at the University of Oregon by Jessica Green in her BioBE project.
I have become interested in the ideas of ‘deep’ ecology, which is a politicized view of the environment that aims to adopt a non-anthropocentric view of the natural world. It proposes an alternative kind of practice that is in contrast to a ‘shallow’ engagement with nature in which technological fixes improve the compatibility of machines with nature according to a set of predetermined parameters. Shallow ecology does not address the ‘deep’ systemic and societal issues that underpin the industrial destruction of the biosphere. (see Næss, Arne (1973) ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.’ Inquiry 16: 95–100).
‘Deep ecology’ also embraces an ethics of ecological practice in which a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community but is wrong when it tends otherwise. This is in contrast to modernist principles that rely on the market place for guidance on whether a shopping mall should be built on virgin land, rather than whether the act is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. ‘Deep’ ecology also reduces the status of objects, or products — which are considered as being of secondary importance, to the relationships between things. By decentring the production of objects, the modern and post-modern obsessions that commoditize human history through industrial practices, can be offset.
For the everyday urban planner and construction engineer working on a building, the ideas of deep ecology are likely to feel strange — probably New Age-y. Yet they are grounded in a scientific practice of complexity that ALSO embodies an ethical perspective. To those that who have been schooled in sciences such as, engineers — this is unfamiliar terrain and the biggest challenges are pedagogical ones. We urgently need conversations that deal with the modernist imperative that is so pervasive in our society, in every sphere. Right now modernism dominates ecological narratives in the quest for ‘green’ products, technologies or the construction of carbon-zero cities.
We need to find new ways of talking about our shared challenges and visions of what a ‘good’ result of ‘sustainable’ development are. Sustainability, like everything else in this modern age that has purchase, has been abstracted and productized to become data sets of carbon counts and LEED standards — as a kind of industrial conservation exercise — that will respond to some greenwash and re-branding. Cities themselves are not broken. The concrete and brick and steel are not accountable for our damaging environmental practices — yet we find a way to absolve ourselves of the consequences of our choices by blaming their material properties. In my view, the term ‘sustainability’ indicates the need for a systemic change in thinking and these dialogues need to be kept alive across generations.
We may not be able to radically change the way that steel or concrete are made but we can change our ways of thinking.
We need to resist pessimistic discussions about ages of austerity and going ‘without’ if we are going to inspire youth. They need a positive role to play in our shared future and we must find new places of abundance that can fire up their imaginations and engage their passion. If we care about successive generations then we have a duty to change our current practices and think much longer term about our collective survival. We need to find a way of shaping a legacy that we can be proud of — not because we’ve created a technological fix within a production cycle of 3–5 years — but because we’ve forged an enduring vision that can be shared and aspired to across generations.
‘Deep’ ecological design practices raise questions about our agency within the biosphere and are essential in shaping human development. Its practice accepts the co-authorship of cities with other non-human agencies and identifies ways of working with them to find new construction approaches for human development where buildings are not ‘made’ for but ‘evolved’ with their inhabitants. With the advent of ‘living materials’, which share some of the properties of living things, like algae facades that can use sunlight and carbon dioxide at a building interface to form biofuels, architecture is re-inhabited by techno-political-social-cultural acts of design that do not strive for the production of objects and artifacts but synthesize systems.
Living matter, as a co-author in the evolution of cities invokes a new category of architectural materials and technologies through which we can imagine buildings — that are not assembled as a set of objects but are transformed by, extruded from and evolved within bodies and materials. They generate a whole new set of processes, technologies, lifespans and expectations of whose performance needs a different kind of evaluation that exists beyond — but does not exclude an appreciation of — mechanical efficiency, or geometry.
Living materials and their technologies work with the unique qualities of living things such as their robustness, flexibility and capacity to deal with a changing environment whose goals are steeped in ‘persistence’ narratives rather than odes to ‘efficiency’. ‘Deep’ ecological architecture does not strive for objects as its primary pursuit but generates materials, meanings and physical traces as a consequence of the entangled web of human and non-human agencies, in which human engineers and designers can strategically act with significant force.
When people and biota are entangled through mutually supportive relationships and connecting technologies, they begin to dissolve the distinction between architecture and landscape and subvert dualistic practices. They create systems in their place that connect the interests of one with the interests of all through positive and negative feedback loops, which characterise natural cyclical events such as, expansion and reduction, or circadian rhythms.
A ‘deep’ ecological engagement with materials has far reaching impacts on human history and the production of architecture. It requires reflection on what groups of participating things actually constitute a human body, a building, a community, public and private spaces, or the city as a whole. Moreover, these questions call for consideration of the moral, ethical, political and social status of non-human assemblages within urban communities as well as our responsibility and accountability for them.
Inherent to a ‘deep’ ecological architectural practice is the question of time itself, since our cities are evolved, not made. While urgent action is needed to remediate the damaging impacts of industrialization on the natural world, truly sustainable impacts evolve on a longer scale and are shared over generations. Antonio Gaudi’s ‘La Sagrada Familia’, has caused wonder and inspired generations despite its incompleteness. Could the idea of a building in continual evolution offer a new paradigm for the practice of the built environment? And how do we keep youth meaningfully engaged in a vision of a longer-term development — in which cities and people co-evolve towards a common goal?
Subsequent generations need to share our dreams and learning experiences — rather be issued with directives for questions that we simply do not know the answer to — in a manner that forges greater biospherical narratives.
We will not achieve a ‘quick fix’ to the way that we currently pollute our environment, we have become too comfortable with an ideology of disposability — and leaving our comfort zones of familiarity certainly won’t be easy. But we have much to look forward to. We will discover different styles of living and ways of loving the age we’re alive in — providing we keep our ways of thinking open.
We may not be ready to change. We may not have the current mindset to make the necessary leaps of imagination today. But the next generation certainly does have this ability. And if we want to resist the wrath of the ‘sixth’ great extinction — then we have absolutely no choice but to try.
Nik: Talking about living & complex systems, any effort to describe them leads to notions such as change, adaptivity, resilience, … In a sense, these notions define the identity of the natural world. In some circumstances we humans — part of that world — are happy of the way our natural environment continuously responds to changes within it. But not always changes are pleasing or beneficial to us. It is there we get the human impulse to overrule nature and push it a little in the direction we’d like it to go. But the notion of change continues to inspire the way we shape our world.
Rachel: We already do this in farming, gardening and cooking — we have developed skills that enable us to influence by engagement rather than through control. Nature will always be a potent force that can overwhelm us so our task in a living culture of materiality will be to remain engaged and ‘conversant’ with those agencies that we rely on. Whether we are human or not, Nature does not discriminate in where its forces are directed, this is not a human problem, but a challenge for all living things which have evolved a whole host of strategies to overcome. Again this comes down to an ‘editing’ process and diversity of forms of engagement with natural systems. Some creatures build barriers against the environment — like snails/shelled creatures to prevent desiccation — some bend and move with environmental perturbation — like seaweeds that do not have stiff lignin in their stems — and others simply hide until danger has passed like organisms that spore under hostile conditions. The interesting thing is that ‘life’ and ‘nature’ cannot be ‘solved’ with a single strategy. That is why we need to remain continually engaged and responsive to change — this is the basis for evolution and the ability to survive as the world changes around (or alongside) us.
Soft control through cultural editing, relationship building and physical engagement with our manufacturing systems.
I don’t go along with this dualistic nature of man/nature … my thinking is about networks that are edited and shaped by interactions … we push nature (not control it) — nature pushes back.
So far we’ve only had dualistic tools to deal with complex embodied systems … this is changing and will impact on our relationship with nature.
We will see the rise of ‘soft’ forms of environmental control, an ongoing interaction between people and their environments, which are moderated via technologies and are more like gardening or cooking than the applications of gadgets.
Nik: James Lovelock’s Gaia theory proposes we look at the Earth as one giant, complex organism. In a way, by shifting perspective and ‘redesigning’ the material world biologically and synthetically, in a sense you make a similar move. In your view, we will physically weave or co-evolve, co-author new interactions between our anthroposphere, biosphere and technosphere, blending them into a new kind of complex system, a network of many complex systems in their own right. In a sense we have always done so, yet this time it will be different still, won’t it?
Rachel: I am sympathetic to — but don’t buy into — the Gaia theory … it’s been associated with ‘consciousness’ which is extrinsic to matter and the materiality that I am interested in possesses innate liveliness — without connections to ‘noospheres’ etc. Also the earth is not ‘an organism’ — it’s an interesting metaphor — but we have very specific definitions of what an organism is, and it’s not the same as a planetary system — even if it’s one with a very interesting self-regulating layer that is situated where the solid surface meets a gaseous ‘sea’ or atmosphere. So, ‘vibrant materiality’ is different to Gaia since it’s based on a philosophy that does not separate ‘mind and matter’. It is literal, rather than lyrical (but does not exclude lyrical interpretations of its ‘real’ phenomenology). The consequence of this is that new spatial relationships are forged based on how we think things are connected (this takes place through technology and how we manipulate our surroundings), which architecture brings together through interventions in our environment …
Nik: Many design disciplines strive to harness the power of change, adaptivity, resilience, etc.
Rachel: These are the desires of complex systems with networks of interaction that are process and relationship-led and imbued with meaning.
Nik: In former times a design process had a clear endpoint, the point at which ‘the design process’ would be frozen, to fixate shape/form. We cherished certainty, sameness, predictability …
Rachel: Well, this is the outcome of the Cartesian, machine-based, object-fixated worldview …
Nik: Nowadays, we increasingly want the flux characterizing the design process to continue after we — as designers — sent our designs into the world. We design for change … objects that alter themselves, that can be altered, appropriated by their users, services that may catalyze changes in social systems, experiences that reshape business models, etc. With complex systems, living/nearly living systems that are in essence ‘process’, how do we shape this process to an outcome, to obey our will? Or is that exactly what will change, the way we deal with what we want and what ‘cells’ and ‘stuff’ want?
Rachel: The consequence of Cartesian philosophy is a particular notion of ‘control’. This is embodied in the machine and has been augmented by Hooke’s Law and the exponential rise of computer processing power (the brain of machines). It is belligerent to an external reality and oblivious to the environment. The idea of control is related to the domination and performance of objects. When the way we imagine the fundamental fabric of the world differently, concepts such as control change. In ‘nature’ there is no ‘control’ — nothing has absolute control over anything else — it’s like that game of fire, scissors, stone & paper, each different ‘elemental’ force in the game has a particular power and can influence the game depending on their context. With complexity we’re developing along the lines of ‘interaction’ and ‘engagement’ generated by the internet culture (which is the first everyday experience of ‘complexity’ as means of thinking about the world). Interaction enables participants to modify and personalize experiences — to shape their surroundings and become co-authors. This personalization of space starkly contrasts modernism’s homogeneity and conformism. Digital manufacturing has not really allowed us to transfer this notion of personalization into the material world as it is limited by a) software programs b) the kinds of materials that can be used in these systems and c) the scale at which digital manufacturing can occur. Living materials, like living things themselves, will not ‘obey our will’, they will respond to changing context without the need for our surveillance. Life uses rules of survival that are a very different kind of ‘control’ to machines — not domination but through engagement. This way of influencing (rather than ‘controlling) is not an unfamiliar experience as we have already employed these strategies before the age of machines in gardening and agriculture. Although they require ‘work’ and personal surveillance of the outcomes of interaction, we gain benefits from the effort that we put into these systems. Living materials will shape our spaces, not at the same kind of push button level of experience such as, the instant appearance of a picture on a television set but more like the change of seasons. Living materials and their technologies provide a more Romantic kind of interaction in the syntheses of experience.
We are co-authors in the Age of Complexity, or the Age of Ecology, in which we understand that our influence is through continual engagement with the systems and networks that our work and desires are entangled with.
It’s a different relationship to rural based forms of interaction as technological convergences are key and enable us to maintain these systems by integrative kinds of practice that are described as NBIC convergence, which specifies that — Nanotechnology, Biology, Information Science and Cognitive Technologies — as research fields that possess the kinds of qualities that could result in disruptive innovation. In practice, this means that scientific disciplines that normally have little to do with each other such as, information technology and chemistry, can work on common projects to explore the possibility of developing technologies that otherwise would not have a research and development platform. In this way, the principles of synthetic biology and synthetic ecologies are taking a directed approach to problem solving and integrated technological developments. These are in contrast to rural and biomimicry based approaches, which are looking for ‘nature’ to drive outcomes rather than taking the proactive combinatorial approach that characterizes synthetic design and the NBIC convergence. But the outcomes of synthetic practices are qualitatively different since, although human engagement is required to engage and orchestrate outcomes, the degree of time investment is much less than previous ways of working with nature because of the proactive nature of the design and engineering projects that harness other technological developments as part of the solution.
Nik: The biomimicry movement emphasizes that in many ways ‘nature knows best’, since billions of years of evolution have proven what works and what doesn’t. From an ecological, systemic perspective, nature’s logic or motivation can be very different from our own. As we now have entered an age in which we can use the building bricks of nature to ‘create’ new or next-generation nature, our notion of nature is changing dramatically. How do you look at this?
Rachel: I reject the idea of ‘nature’ as a machine — this is essentially the philosophical premise behind biobricks and biomimicry. Nature is complex — it is non-linear — I think that Ilya Prigogine best expresses this, writing with Isabelle Stengers he says … “Whitehead understood perhaps more sharply than anyone else that the creative evolution of nature could never be conceived if the elements composing it were defined as permanent, individual entities that maintained their identity throughout all changes and interactions. But he also understood that to make all permanence illusory, to deny being in the name of becoming, to reject entities in favor of a continuous and ever-changing flux meant falling once again into the trap always lying in wait for philosophy — to ‘indulge in brilliant feats of explaining away. Thus for Whitehead the task of philosophy was to reconcile permanence and change, to conceive of things as process, to demonstrate that becoming forms entities, individual identities that are born and die. (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, p.95)” … In other words, nature is a continual process — which is contrary to the philosophy underpinning biobricks and biomimicry.
Nature has a couple of definitions that are currently widely used.
The first is as a cosmic force, in keeping with Baruch Spinosa’s perspective, which sets the tolerance limits of what is possible. If Nature defines the possibilities within our universe then no matter how improbable, or artificially induced events are — they are a natural occurrence.
Janine Beynus, who pioneers the field of biomimicry believes that nature ‘knows best’ and harnesses biological solutions to create novel industrial designs. She proposes that “nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with” and it is our job to uncover these treasures. Yet a non-interventionist approaches to natural processes can result in ‘bio fatalism’. Simply waiting for nature to teach us and reveal all possible solutions restricts our immediate access to bio-inspired innovation. It is impossible to deduce all biological outcomes computationally, as the outputs are unpredictable, surprising and sometimes, even freaky. Nature has no particular urgency that fuels its inventions. Humans, on the other hand, have a different set of rules.
In the industrial age, nature has taken on a fresh definition. Owing to the extensive environmental manipulation that mechanical technologies has provided us with has prompted a new idea of Nature that culturally regarded as various degrees of absence of humans and their activities.
My personal perspective comes from an ecological engagement with materiality, which is not a dualistic worldview of man/nature but a complex set of networked relationships that entwine our interactions with our environment and our ecological communities. I regard nature as being a cosmic system, similar to Spinosa’s view but without invoking a ‘god’ — rather a more secular, self-organizing primordial force that permeates the universe (rather like Hume’s perspective on Spinosa’s ideas) that is shaped by the strangeness of material networks and the connections between matter.
Working with nature means taking stewardship of an extended network of influence in our world, which needs to be maintained by reinforcement — through technologies, human interaction or the participation of non-human agents such as, bacteria and synthetic biologies. I am supportive of Koert van Mensvoort’s ideas of Next Nature, which proposes that nature is a cultural and phenomenological construct that changes along with us. In other words …
we culturally decide what is nature which subsequently determines what material manifestations of these ideas are recognized and celebrated as ‘natural’.
Our current infrastructures and technologies do not enable us to formally manipulate the connections that we share with the natural world and obey a mechanical/industrial/dualistic paradigm in which humans go head to head with nature. If the ultimate goal of the 20th century was to master control of the atom then the ultimate pursuit of the 21st century is to look at the emergent properties of the atom and try to orchestrate these in natural phenomena.
Nik: Bill Joy’s famous article “Why the future doesn’t need us” was in a sense a plea to thread carefully as we increase our technological knowledge and know-how … He cautions us to carefully think through the possible consequences of technologies we develop — both intended and unintended, to act responsibly. How do you look at some of the technologies you are developing and see developing around you in this light?
Rachel: It is simply not possible to ‘future proof’ our actions. The best that scientists and architects can do is to apply their knowledge and skills in a considered way and use their abilities wisely. This will not prevent extreme circumstances, ill will or malice from a few. Science has learned to build in safeguards in their living technologies and has developed biological ‘switches’ for genetically engineered organisms and governments have set up regulatory bodies to discuss the ethical and social implications of technological progress. However, as much as we try to regulate, to paraphrase William Gibson ‘the street finds its uses for things’ and as cautious as we may individually or collectively be, the unforeseen will always unfold. However, as gloomy as this sounds, the unforeseen also happens when we do not develop technology, do not try to address previously insoluble challenges and hold on tightly to the status quo — as the world changes around us. The point is that the decision to not develop new technologies, to not try to change the nature of manufacturing practices or to find alternative sources of energy for fossil fuels is as damaging as hanging on to what we know. There is no panacea but since the world will continue to evolve with or without us, I believe it is in our favour to prepare ourselves for the unknown, the push at the envelope of possibility and challenge everything that we think we know.
Nobody can predict the future, but we can prepare, do the groundwork, experiment, develop and proactively adapt towards it.
Technology is the way that the human mind becomes embodied in the process of problem solving. Technology is the way that we think being instrumented. Neal Stephenson noted that in Porosh’s Law — that with the advent of the human mind there is no nature. Heidegger talked about our technologies as being a process of revealing the way we value the world. So our greatest challenges are not the object technologies but the thought processes that shape them, the moral codes that frame them and the paradigms that inform them. We are our own best friends and worst enemies. The challenges that technology faces with respect to its applications are not limited to specific technologies but to a much broader set of issues relevant to human relationships.
With synthetic biology specific opportunities that could be used to cause widespread harm are possible, as are the possible destructive consequences of nuclear technologies, lasers and even spears. But specifically synthetic biology brings to the table for potential abuse a set of complex technologies that we do not yet know how to formally control and whose consequences could be likened to epidemiological challenges through, the manufacturing of anthrax and biological weapons of mass destruction. Juan Enriquez speaking at Autodesk’s Ideas conference earlier this year also pointed out that without the development of these technologies we will lose out in our ability to feed populations with GM foods that can weather harsh terrains and do not need fertilizers, see a rise in malaria as global warming brings disease riddled mosquitoes north and suffer deficits in fuel production as fossil fuel reserves dwindle. While central regulation may not be able to address all the potential issues of a technology that is still at its earliest stages of development one new source of regulation, the synthetic biology community, may be able to remain vigilant to developments and claims that are either not true or potentially harmful to society. One such low-key example was the ousting of Rayfish footwear’s claim to have genetically modified stingrays to adopt specific patterns and colours ordered by online customers. The synthetic biology community quickly stepped up to these claims to establish that what was being proposed was simply not possible and that the process was likely to be a scam. The issues raised by the Rayfish footwear company of course do not preclude low key activity by terrorist groups using information available online and low tech laboratories to conduct experiments in genetic modification but Marc Goodman, FBI security advisor, who gave a recent 2012 TEDGlobal talk , urges that …
our future biosafety is too important to leave solely to the hands of the professionals and calls for a more cooperative surveillance community.
Nik: A vigilant society is only as effective as the degree to which it is well-informed and well-educated. In other words, from a societal perspective, the gap between those who understand and those who do not, needs to be well-guarded. If we’d want to accelerate the shaping of young people’s literacy and worldview in this ‘age of the ecological human’, how should we go about this according to you?
Rachel: The Ecological Human is biological and social re-engagement with the world that we think we know. It’s a process of exploration so I’d involve them in the questions we’re asking, involve them in the research we’re conducting, involve them in the predicament that we’re in as collaborators — not just consumers of information — we should stop pretending we know the future and giving them instructions to conduct themselves as if they are in an ‘age of austerity’ and rather invite them to participate in figuring out how we can move forwards positively, responsibly and with vision. Our next generation is much more adaptable than the current one, so we should encourage their participation rather than obstruct them with rules that we don’t know ourselves whether they work or not.
Nik: Are our educational systems not still hardwired to the age of the machine?
Rachel: Yes!
Nik: To name but one challenge is how to guarantee a balance between specialist and generalist knowledge, as to assure that we can deal with the complexities of the ecological worldview in a bidirectional way, not merely downward to the cell or the basepair, but also upward to new biologies, new ecologies, new cultures, new consciousness …
Rachel: We need to understand much more about complex systems, non-linear systems and ecology as the embodiment of these principles — modern science still has not made this transition … but even more fundamentally we need to challenge the principles of education that are still founded on a monastic systems that sees divisions between specialities and works on old local, communications platforms … we’re starting to see some of these changes with TED’s promotion of ‘radical openness’ which has been adopted (at least in part) by some of the prestigious universities such as Stanford and Harvard — but change is always an emergent process and there is still a long way to go before we’re looking at any kind of paradigm shift. It may take a few generations!
Nik: As you emphasize the need to focus on patterns of thought, another important challenge will undoubtedly be how we envision leadership in this changing world. It appears like the divide and conquer logic (intended here in the deeper sense of a structuring of the mind and away of perceiving and acting upon the world) of the legal — and financial world and their disciples, many of which are still taking up the majority of leadership positions, could not be farther from the mindset of the ecological humans. How do you envision the transitions here?
Rachel: There is a lot of power in distributed systems, networks and global forms of self-organization and mobilization as a counterpoint to the current hierarchical capitalist world economy. Again something like the TEDx events (independently organized TED events where ideas are exchanged and change-making communities start to build) starts to embody what kinds of systems can be organised without the assistance of national bodies or large corporation. Also crowdfunding starts to suggest alternative models of finance, there is a call for ‘open’ publishing of scientific papers and a whole emerging ‘maker’ movement — these are the kinds of organizations that will enable transitions that subvert the usual hierarchical forms of control to happen.
Nik: On the upside, what in your view are some of the most exciting new possibilities they might open up?
Rachel: I’d actually say that ‘algae’ culture is going to be a very interesting technology that intersects with the existing commercial paradigm enough to be sufficiently influential in creating a social and cultural change. Imagine that people could produce their own currency in the form of fuel, which would be directly exchangeable for other goods and services. This changes the power base between corporations and their traditional ‘consumers’ as they now have ‘producer’ capacity. But imagine that home bioreactors could not only harvest energy from algae but also high value molecules from bacterial vats (which would be grown like home-brew, or within aquariums embedded within the walls of living spaces) so that individuals could actually become suppliers for commercial outlets that then would provide services more like farmers markets where local producers could come to exchange knowledge and build trade relationships. Perhaps there may be a market for a high value cheese and wine market where cheeses have therapeutic qualities since they are matured with genetically modified bacteria and wines are developed to have super-high levels of beneficial compounds such as, anti-oxidants … a corporation with interest in a cheese & wine market may benefit by providing the forum through which wider markets could be reached and introduce new vendors such as, wine glasses made with melted sand by solar sinters. Essentially the situation arises where distributed manufacturing networks provide an alternative system of commerce, which may or may not intersect and symbiose with certain corporations, but which ultimately could become independent of them. What is most interesting about synthetic biology and living technologies is that politically they represent the fusion of nature and machine, which is an interesting eventuality for Marxism and socialism and the idea that humans perform best when working ‘in a state of nature’. And if the ideological left can embrace the potential of synthetic biology and living technology as allies in the means of production then perhaps a real strategy to counter capitalism and its exclusive, destructive hierarchies, is possible.
With synthetic biology technologies and materials we may even begin to regard the resultant soft forms of material manufacturing and their alternative taxonomic systems as part of our most intimate communities. They may adopt the same kind of relationship that we have evolved with bacteria and viruses that have invaded our human genome and which escape our everyday awareness. In this sense, our new relationships with synthetic biologies and ecologies will be regarded as entirely ‘natural’ (Note: Koert van Mensvoort proposes that nature and culture evolve together in a fusion he describes as ‘Next Nature’.) With our increasing familiarity and comfort in working with living materials that connect diverse communities of actors and actants, new ways of thinking about architecture may be possible.
For example, we may regard our homes as literally being ‘part of us’ and connected to us by a series of architectural organs that are forged by a variety of living materials, each of which are performing different functions.
Our houses may not be viewed as merely a site, shelter, or barrier against the external elements but a membrane, or mycelium, that connects us with the natural world that we nurture with the same care that we’d lavish on our own bodies. Our buildings are consumed and reconstructed by the activities of their inhabitants and hosts of other entangled actants and change with time. These reconfiguring relationships produce material traces that embody ecological activity, like the substances that worms produce in their networks of burrows being “… not mere excavations, but may rather be compared with tunnels lined with cement” (C. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Actions of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits, John Murray, London, UK, 1881, page 112. Note: This substance now identified as a calcite silica mix, which is a cement-like substance and whose architectural activities have shaped human history by causing poor soils to become fertile, enabling the global spread of agriculture.) ‘Deep’ ecological architecture may be viewed as being as natural to our existence as our immune systems, which works with similar degrees of complexity recognizing which substances are ‘wanted’ and which should be rejected.
Nik: The sick building syndrome could get a whole new connotation here ;-)
Rachel: I’d actually be very interested to ask Jessica Green whether she’s looked at the indoor bacterial biomes — and other microflora — of ‘sick buildings.’ I’d also be very interested to see whether there is a predictive value in the indoor microflora of buildings and the health of inhabitants. Simon Park (bacteriologist) has been observing the cryptobiology of urban spaces and noticing where the presence of algae, lichen and bacterial biofilms can tell us something about local environmental health.
These organs may have structural similarities with the soils in terms of their local variations, complexity and ability to influence biospherical systems. Soil, rather than being the horizontal, geometrically defined amount of dirt we have beneath our feet, it is transformed into a living system that nurtures our emerging ‘soft’ cities.
Our homes will have water filled organs that are connected in parallel to filter internal and external environments to extract useful nutrients or remove unwanted toxins. They will glow at night from the vibrations of passing traffic or footprints to activate bioluminescent bacteria and will dance to the cymatic vibrations of your ipod speaker on their containers.
This change in manufacturing and infrastructural paradigm may actually change our economic framework — as consumers start to become producers. The beginnings of a revolution in manufacturing is taking place right now that is taking place in domestic environments and is much more like home brewing than a sterile, production assembly line for tiny machines. You probably won’t have some across it yet because it’s happening in domestic spaces — Cathal Garvey uses biotechnology in his bedroom in Cork, Ireland — working in a manner that already has a precedent in the way that sheds were the manufacturing outlets for the personal computer revolution started by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in the 1970s.
Nik: Speaking of economics, an interesting question is how in the “age of the ecological human” our value exchange systems will (need to) be different. Will the value of a living being be expressed in terms of his/her bacteria or biota for example? What would the currency and mode of exchange be like? Could you elaborate on this?
Rachel: I hope there would be mixed forms of currency, a variety of different values and a speciation of techniques and technologies to underpin the change towards ‘ecological human’. As I’ve mentioned if we can create a system where people can make high value products using biological and living technologies then it is possible to create new value and use these developments as a platform for social and cultural change.
The kinds of products that are being produced are much more (commercially) valuable than alcohol and include biodiesel and high value chemical products.
For example, Sustainable Now Technologies a young algae biotech company is set to create technology that could mean that you make enough home based biodiesel in your shed — so that you may never need to visit a fuel station again!
Sustainable Now Technologies harness the incredible power of strange plant-like creatures called algae. They have an incredible ability to use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make complex substances like oils and alcohols. In fact, the ancestors of these life forms were also responsible for making the oxygen in the atmosphere that we breathe today.
These bioreactors — a fancy name for an aquarium that grows algae — can be likened to tiny farms that graze ‘little green cows’ (algae) on carbon dioxide and sunlight. The algae get fat with biofuel and are circulated into a shed (which is simply a copper pipe), by a small fish tank motor that is driven by solar energy. Here they are exposed to a low voltage shock, which ‘milks’ them by causing them to let out a little blob of ‘cream’. The oil is then dried and absolutely no algae are harmed in the process. Over a week enough biodiesel could be obtained from a thousand gallons of algae to keep a family car topped up for all your around-town journeys. There’s a double save here — one for not driving to the garage to top up and one for not having to pay at a fuel station for fuel.
What’s more is that it is possible to pipe the carbon dioxide coming from your natural gas (methane) burner into the bioreactor to feed the algae and not only make more fuel but also to reduce your carbon footprint in the process! It is also possible to make biofuel even if you don’t have access to natural light since these processes can be driven by a fluorescent light bulb that can be powered by renewables.
Domestic biotechnology adopters do not make products, they have lifestyles.
Let me share an algae lifestyle with you.
It’s a baking hot day in Los Angeles — remember the world will on average get hotter. There is a small courtyard, a terrarium, an algae barbecue, and in the shed there is a thousand gallon ‘biodiesel’ unit right next to the family car. Over on the house there are windows with little green particles in them that can dance to your iPod music that are making biodiesel for the home. These windows are connected to a series of different tanks that — can process waste and recycle water. The metabolic power of tiny organisms can be used in many ways to perform many different kinds of processes, such as the production of natural gas, bioluminescence (light) and the recycling of water within a building. Rather than thinking of our homes as being inert shells that are inhabited only by us — we could think of these bioreactors as co-inhabitants that make oil for us in exchange for shelter. And they’re powerful. These bioreactors are vibrant enough to supply homes and also small businesses.
In the very near future we will see buildings that have installed the bioreactors as rather strangely developed ‘organs’ that are full of different tiny creatures doing different kinds of chemical work. Being ‘close’ to nature is a tangible feeling in these algae lifestyle communities — after all — everyone is simply hanging out in gardens while being at home — just much smaller versions than the ones the were once used to.
Algae lifestyle breeds community. Neighbors start to exchange fuel as currently directly and are more in touch with the physical natural world than those sitting in front of a digital screen. It is possible that — similar to the way computers shrank from mainframes to desktop size with increasing efficiency — this kind of trajectory may be possible for ‘green’ computers — which is all that a bioreactor is. Algae may in the next few decades act as rechargeable fuel batteries that do not need a power socket — just sunlight and carbon dioxide.
Right now, these units have to be custom made — so they’re still expensive to install. Yet, despite that — within around 5 years the price of installing one — it will have paid for itself. After this probationary period, these organs in your home will keep on producing value substances. And it is not only likely that the cost for one of these units will continue to fall but they can also be built from recycled materials.
Mainstream algae technology right now exists within an industrial model of practice and — when it imagines itself as a centralized energy company — it simply cannot go head to head commercially with the crude oil producers. However, from a local, domestic perspective algae technology may be the greatest opportunity to make a change from being consumers to producers.
Producers will be a very interesting and challenging set of customers for companies to be working with as, of yet, they are also an unknown.
However, ‘producers’ are likely to be ‘richer’ than consumers because they have natural assets. Biofuels and their products may be traded alternative kind of currency that may also be offset against carbon taxation. By being taxed less and spending less money on buying energy from centralized fuel providers ‘producers’ may also simply, have more conventional cash to spend than ‘consumers’. And because of who they are — they’ll be sure to do so in an ecological manner.
Companies will need to find new ways of forming a relationship with these producers and perhaps reflect their understanding of them by adopting algae/biotech lifestyles and demonstrating their leadership in these areas. Corporations may even decide to change their ‘old’ sustainability portfolios that practice ‘substitutional’ values for new ways of embodying an environmentally positive (rather than less damaging) methods.
Perhaps one of the most interesting challenges of living with biotech is the appreciation of scale. This is not something that we’ve had to think about before so it’s also an opportunity for new markets and advertising.
Historically we design at a particular scale because we have the tools to do this. Now we have cheap printers that really struggle to produce objects bigger than a sheet of A4 paper. These will be the new workhorses of the home-based biotech industry.
For example, the Cronin group in Glasgow recently published a paper in Nature to show their one step chemical manufacturing process to produce silicon sealant in a low-end 3D printer. So making at a small scale is not a problem.
However visualizing what is being made is trickier. At the Cronin WETFab workshop we made a makeshift microscope by placing a CD lens over an i-phone and the beauty of biotech is that — at the tiniest scales it does not need control — as it self-assembles and manufactures itself — because of the nature of its materials. Producers do not need to do all the work. They simply shape the outcomes.
But once we’re familiar with the micro scale as a site for design and interaction — perhaps with home computers and better lenses — we can start to use DNA messaging and protein encryption codes to provide data about our daily lives. For example, small color changes could indicate how resources are being used that may directly create a response from the building to adjust the metabolism of its ‘remedial or synthetic organs’.
The micro scale may also provide the site for abundance and excess in overcrowded megacities.
In his TED Longbeach 2012 talk, Peter Diamandis outlined that our basic resource problem is not the actual amount of stuff that we use — but how we access it. Perhaps by thinking in terms of folded surfaces rather than brute volumes — we can think of our living spaces as greatly expanded at the micro scale — so that they become abundant sites of biochemical synthesis to underpin our role as ‘producers’.
Here is an example from nature. Soil is a rich environment where huge amounts of biochemical synthesis take place. It actually only forms a tiny percentage of the material of the earth but is essential to all living processes. Soil therefore has a small volume but since it is riddled with little channels between soils particles, it offers a rich environment in which water can be stored, creatures can live and materials can be produced and recycled. So if we imagine the surface of every building as being a potential site for the creation of soil — using home based manufacturing techniques — that work with living organisms selected to suit that particular environment — then we can build a new distributed production system within our densely packed megacities from the bottom-upwards and select different kinds of biology to inhabit and work with us in our homes. This kind of lifestyle is more than sustainable — it has the potential to evolve alongside the unpredictable consequences of climate change!
We are in desperate need of a qualitatively different kind of economy that impacts on our environment. Our current practice of slow conservation is simply going in the wrong direction — no matter how strict we are about our ways of working.
There are now more people looking for natural solutions to our current situations than ever before who actually want to make a contribution — rather than sit back and minimize their existence through conservation — or a puritanical view of manufacturing practice and consumption.
Ultimately this is no good for business and it’s not the way that life ‘actually’ works either.
Of course, this revolution in the making is not going to happen overnight. It took Steve Jobs and Bill Gates another 25 years from their sheds to turn their innovation into trillion dollar businesses. But this is a very short time in the scenario planning that we’re currently facing and it is a qualitatively different shift in the way that we think about how we make, consume and ultimately responsibly shape our environment.
Yet perhaps our biggest challenge is not of substance or approach but time. We understand that urgent action is needed to remediate the damaging impacts of industrialisation on the natural world. Instinctively, we seek quick fixes to existing challenges, to meet centralised targets and building standards. But truly sustainable impacts evolve in longer timeframes and are shared over generations and the choices that we make today will determine what direction we are taking our planet in and will shape our children’s future.
Human development is now enabled to synergistically evolve with the biosphere and helps us coauthor an ecologically engaged future — in spite of, not because of, the odds. Our future is neither determined nor predictable but there are countless possibilities within the physical constraints of our possible futures. Soft cities and their synthetic technologies and materials offer a new vision of human development that flows within a physical infrastructure of interactions that are built through our participation with non-human communities. Together we can address the significant challenges that we face in the advent of a sixth great extinction.
Nik: It seems that many factors are falling into place, all of which are necessary to render the age of ecological humans ‘inevitable’, perhaps even as the destined future of the technium to put it in Kevin Kelly’s words (cf. What technology wants). However, just to add a little to the scenario thinking here … What could according to you stand in the way of its happening?
Rachel:
The biggest obstacle to the advent of an ecological human is time.
It is likely that a cultural shift in thinking about our environment will take at least a generation, more likely to be a few and with every year that passes in our global attitude to the environment (to paraphrase Herman E. Daly — we’re treating the planet like a business in liquidation) we are creating more irretrievable damage to our natural resources, which will take even longer to find a new kind of approach to resolve the human issues — while respecting and engaging the non-human ones. My main concern is the huge loss of life, misery and sheer ‘inhumanity’ that the inertia of change may bring — although we really don’t know what the future will hold — it is time for a radical change in the way we work and relate to our planet. Also I don’t think we dream big enough as we’re used to very short turn around times for delivery. I also think that community building will be an enormous challenge across geographical locations and across cultures. Other resistance will of course come from corporations that are committed to industrial practices and who will insist that the current industrial form of ‘sustainability’ they use is simply enough — it is the consumer who is at fault in these paradigms by not making the right ‘green’ choices. So the corporations will tell us that they have the answer and governments will believe them because they are afraid to damage economies and keep on sinking taxpayers money into ‘business as usual’ scenarios.
The problem with ‘sustainability’ as a design aspiration is that it was ‘designed by committee’ rather than springing from the loins of an emerging movement. It has coalesced from a frothing primeval soup of disparate environmental aspirations, whose origins are grounded in the science of ecology, which concerns itself with the empirical study of how creatures and their surroundings co-evolve. Since ecology itself engages with various scientific disciplines — biology, physics, chemistry, permaculture, soil studies, bacteriology, atmospheric science, geology, oceanography and geography — sustainability is inevitably a chimera being part human, part meteorological, part ecological and part geological. But like Gaia, sustainability also pertains to a manifestation of ‘nature’, and is therefore also part mythological. As a paradigm changer, its birth was somewhat difficult since, like an untimely caesarian section, it came with cost implications. However, it was boldly midwifed into existence by industry, which had longed for an organic child of its own for several decades, to compensate for the growing awareness and guilty burden of an environmentally destructive legacy. With speedy adoption policies, sustainability has grown up as a healthy catch-all phrase that spills out beyond scientific proofs alone and aims to conquer a common foe — global warming. Despite its impartial inception in the belly of science, sustainability has acquired a distinctively political character acquired by exposure to a convoluted series of political assemblies and even more tortuous economic concerns. The political Left regards it as the antidote to capitalist brutality, while the Right denounces its viability as a mere conspiracy theory that simply obstructs economic and industrial progress. Science, recognizing that political conflict could compromise its effectiveness to serve as a new paradigm for human development, has stepped in to arbitrate. However, establishing independent experimental ‘proof’ of the validity of the grand challenge it aims to address has by no means been uneventful. Despite various controversies fit for the pages of an espionage novel, experts have unequivocally established that climate change is not only real, but is also at least in part ‘man-made’. Although skeptics persist, it is perhaps worth reflecting on the continent sized deposits of plastic in our great oceans (see also here). For if we are capable of visibly producing litter in such vast quantities, then perhaps it is also conceivable that we are also dumping our invisible rubbish, in the form of anthropogenically produced greenhouse gases, into our gaseous oceans — the air we breathe.
Crucially though, we are dealing with other issues than the rectification of natural systems that have been destroyed by industrial practices, which is not ‘sustainability’ in the ecological sense. Our ecological concerns concern the systematic degradation of those infrastructures that support ecological systems, which enable them to respond to continual environmental change. The issue we need to address is not how to replace the materials consumed by a recently ‘reinvented’ industrial ideology but how to enrich those natural infrastructures that give rise to our native ecologies. The primary geomorphic material structure of the planet has evolved through the exquisite, spontaneous orchestration of chemical, geological, physical and cosmic forces over the course of 4.5 billion years. Resources that have taken geological timescale to accrue are now being rapidly stripped of the fertile interface between the earth’s molten iron core and its atmosphere — our seas and soils — through geological scale industrial practices such as, mining, deforestation, over-fishing and ocean pollution. For example, fossil fuels require a certain contingency of conditions and infrastructures, in which the tiny creatures whose bodies form the sticky organic secretions of crude oil, perished under particular conditions so that they didn’t decay but putrefied under slow, persistent pressure. While understanding these conditions may help us develop fuel alternatives such as, the conversion of pig manure into crude oil , bringing an animal back from extinction which engages with the same rules of complexity and contingency however, is a far more challenging process. In terms of human development, an ecological future is one in which our natural infrastructures are nourished and extended by our technological processes and interventions through intensive resource management and concern for the evolution of future systems. Ecological technologies foster complex web of interconnections that exists between living and non-living systems, which can be respected, maintained and even extended. Such processes will create developmental opportunities and speculative new economies and resources.
The role of architectural design would be to nurture niche specific, sites of development and propose parallel landscapes and synthetic ecologies that are interwoven with natural infrastructures that are extended by human development.
Nik: In the biased purity of our minds, many major paradigm shifts always happen more or less in a smooth and peaceful way, yet history shows this is not necessarily the case. How do you envision the transition from the age of the machine into the age of the ecological human?
Rachel: The machine to ecological human paradigm shift is a transition that will occur over generations and will not be an overnight enlightenment. However, the technological developments in synthetic biology and living technology represent real steps in producing new ways of making human experiences and with these kinds of projects new revelations will occur. This particular journey will start to give us the tangible results and ways of seeing how we could work that we need — rather than simply talking theory. This is exciting — we can demonstrate real change in practical terms and start to share these materials, technological and approaches. Most of our learning with embodied forms of complex materials which are represented by synthetic biology and living technology will help us understand how it is possible to underpin human development in an environmentally positive way. I only hope that the transition is fast enough and can happen globally enough to prevent further environmental damage, disaster and their sequelae from the extent of our current practice paradigms. Living technology and synthetic biology are not panaceas. It is likely they will be synergistic with industrial approaches and the challenges are in how to design across generations, with big visions of what may be possible and stretch the limits of our imaginations to see ourselves thriving alongside our non-human communities way into the future.
Nik: Rachel, this has been a blast! Thank you so much for taking all this time to chat.
