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Against hard inert buildings
Whether in a dense urban environment or on a ship traveling to outer space, humanity is going to need a new type of architecture that can change, learn, and grow with us in the future. Designer Rachel Armstrong believes that we must move from the static to the “soft and living”. In this manifesto for uncube she outlines her vision for the way forward.
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1.
Soft living architecture is an ecology for twenty-first
century inhabitants to thrive in. While conceptions of
nature have evolved since the Industrial Era,
architectural materials have until now remained
subdued and constrained by hard inert buildings
– or machines for living in.2.
In its approach to its environment,
soft living architecture finds kinship
with both the human and non-human realms.
Yet it does not hanker for an aestheticised
or romanticised notion of bucolic nature.
Nor does it seek a time before our chemical
industrial landscapes, plasticinating seas and
choking skies. Rather it regards them as new
sites of abundance from which primordial
chemical communities can spring into bloom
to synthesise living materials and artificial biologies.All images courtesy Rachel Armstrong
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3.
Soft living architecture is part of a messy reality
where change is sudden, boundaries are real yet
transitory, and interfaces are sites for re-bonding,
not for further separation.
Vibrant architecture is a transformer that does
not find an adversary in the machine, but couples
horizontally with it and swallows it whole.4.
Soft living architecture refuses to be restrained behind
façades of polished stone or hide its wayward tissues
under tidy green lawns. Soft living architecture allies
with the natural world and all its exquisite excrements,
to emerge through strange new configurations caused
by material leakages. Harnessing the potential of
“waste” can change our conception of architecture
as strictly building-oriented. The emerging aesthetic
is not concerned with divisions like “dirty” and “clean”
but is alien, unfamiliar – other. -
5.
Soft living architecture resists the doom, gloom
and skinny corporate corset that is strangling urban
communities with the industrial sustainability agenda,
which demands material obedience, performance
standards and efficiency. It does not sing reassuring
Jolly Green sustainability songs - yet it is deeply entangled
with the natural world, finding the benefits of the
side effects of human existence.6.
In cities, natural processes can be mimicked to forge an
urban metabolism, both ecologically and economically.
Bioprocessing activities such as composting, food and
energy production generate material value within urban
communities through the transformation of resources.
Value re-adjustments within urban spaces may change
the density of resource distribution networks and
therefore influence the way that spaces are inhabited. -
Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Experimental Architecture at the Department of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, University of Newcastle. She is a Black Sky Thinker and 2010 Senior TED Fellow who aims to establish a technical platform that works with the creativity of the natural world through natural computing processes that enable our buildings to share some of the properties of living systems. These soft living architectures raise questions about the potential for materials to become codesigners of our living spaces and are the heart of her experimental architectural practice.
7.
There are no models of soft living architecture in the
same way that no one organism is a model of another.
Soft living architecture is fertile. Its progeny
proliferate as rhizomes of networks that transmute
industrial deserts into vast metabolic fabrics, blooming
with co-evolutionary transformations.8.
Soft living architecture seeks abrupt changes in
established power structures and forms of
social order, rather than assuming that change
happens gradually. Lively exchanges between
cooperating bodies become entangled with
our cultural, moral and ethical systems that
ripple through and interact with our living
spaces and urban fabrics, so that they not only
evolve alongside us – but also reciprocally
design this future. I
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»I don’t mistrust reality of which I hardly know anything. I just mistrust the picture of it that our senses deliver.«
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