SIGNIFICANCE
Conflicts, biodiversity extinctions, climate change, growing population, massive migrations, globalization effects, global housing crisis, the 2030 agenda for zero-net greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and resource shortages have been orienting architecture practices and experimentations for the last decades. Emissions from building operations accounted for around 28% of the total global-related CO2 emissions in 2020 [1]. Twentieth-century building constructions reveal to be no longer sustainable. Materials experimentations and counting carbon emissions are promoting new design possibilities that have a vital role in terms of the circular economy (CE) of the built environment (BE) [2,3]. Contemporary architecture started to reshape practices, while a cradle-to-cradle-oriented construction industry seeks to shift from extractive-based to regenerative-based [4]. Such current demands changed design principles, prioritising the resilient effects of the architecture instead of aesthetic aims. Aesthetic objectives change along with the new approaches’ development, as happened over the past century following industrial progress. Nowadays, we experiment with new forms of digital fabricated and biomorphic architectures inspired by natural ecosystems to gain resilience. That surprisingly better embodied Modernism’s principle that the form follows the function. Based on this, the research proposal investigates the rise of contemporary bio-design approaches, the theories behind them, and the roles of digital fabrication and biology study integration in ongoing developments.
BACKGROUND
To introduce the emergence of new digital and bio-inspired architectures, I would refer to those as movements of contemporary (in terms of current) architecture development. Modernist, Postmodernist and contemporary architectures advanced in the last century, combining engineering with design. On one side, Modernism addressed engineering and scientific management development to reach certain aesthetics, whereas today, digital and bio-design use engineering to exploit scientific achievements. On the other side, both Modernism and contemporary architectures include several discontinuous movements, which in the first one are not always fully compatible [5]. The failure of the Modernist Movement has been explained: like scientific managers, the architects claimed the right to organise life at the factory as well as the home [6]. Modernism’s style as a hallmark, later promoted by the criticism of Postmodernism, has been the cause of the inevitable decline of their theories, both permeated by the concepts of project and program [7]. Their failure lies in managing the environment through technologies and putting humankind at the centre of the world. Nevertheless, in the 1950s, pioneers of the Modernist Movement had already evolved a biomorphic design based on natural shapes, interpreting the city as an organism with organs, skins, and limbs. It evolved in the 1960s in organic architecture, whit experiments with material technologies for creating flexible and curvilinear forms, yet limiting the expression of natural shapes and patterns as pure aesthetic expressions [8]. Contemporarily, engineering started to interconnect with biology and technology [9]. Biomimetic, mimicking the biology of nature, draws primarily from the functional aspects of nature and integrates those with the environmental context: The natural world informs the design [10]. To do this, parametric design and other advanced technologies encourage environmental consciousness and develop from scientific observations. In the 1960s, the Metabolist movement shared the idea of cities as constantly changing and expanding organisms, proposing biological metaphors and techno-scientific images to share a principle of cultural resilience [11]. In the 1970s, condemning the materialism of Modernist architecture, crystallized in pragmatism and compromised by dominant formalism, architects’ experimentations oriented the discipline to new materials, communication, and prefabrications, rejecting a fixed technical method, instead promoting concepts and solutions to empower communities [12]. A further experimental architecture evolved in the 1980s, re-imagining the environment and its relationship with the biosphere [13]. Among the latest-born research fields, biomimicry is drawn on biological potentials to the functional challenges, developing shapes, using less material, with greater sensitivity to facing resource pressures [14]. Stylistic conventions, typical of theories and manifestoes, are less constrained in the architectural solutions shaped by biological adaptations [15]. Algorithmic optimization and digital fabrication allow the opportunity of producing complex forms with new materials [16]. Eventually, the soft living architecture emerged from metabolism and experimental architectures based on molecular science and natural computing techniques, exploiting synthetic biology’s properties such as growth, self-repair, movement and transformation [17]. Ultimately, twenty-first-century projects split, on the one hand, into realizations according to the Modernist and Postmodernist abstraction and de-constructivist aesthetics, which ends in themselves, slowly introducing zero-net carbon principles [18]. On the other hand, biomimicry, biomimetic and soft living architectures do research to achieve regenerating functions to enhance the way the built environment is constructed [19]. In all these latest-born fields, digital fabrication developed new tools with great precision and revolutionized design thinking [20,21].
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[2] L. Havinga, C. De Wol, A. Marvuglia, E. Naboni (Eds.), “Carbon & Ecology within the design process – Environmental Impact Assessment”, in Regenerative design in digital practice. A Handbook for the Built Environment, E. Naboni, L. Havinga (Eds). Bolzano, Italy: Eurac, 2019, pp.217-261.
[3] B. King (Ed.), The New Carbon Architecture. Building to cool the climate. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2017.
[4] W. McDonough, M. Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, New York, USA: North Point Press, 2002.
[5] M. Guillén, The Taylorized Beauty of the Mechanical: Scientific Management and the Rise of Modernist Architecture. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009, p.11.
[6] M. Guillén, ibid., p.21.
[7] V. Olgiati, M. Breitschmid, Non-Referential Architecture. Basel, CH: Simonett & Baer, 2018, pp.13-28.
[8] J. Alison, M. A. Brayer, F. Migayrou, N. Spiller (Eds), Future city. Experiment and utopia in architecture. London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 2002, p.73.
[9] B. Bhushan, “Biomimetics”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 367, 1896, pp.1443-1444, Apr. 2009. Accessed: Aug. 2, 2022, doi:10.1098/rsta.2009.0026. [Online]. Available: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2009.0026.
[10] I. Mazzoleni (Ed.), S. Price, Architecture Follows Nature. Biomimetic principles for innovative design. New York, USA: Taylors and Francis Group, 2013; p.49.
[11] M. Schalk, “The Architecture of Metabolism. Inventing a Culture of Resilience”, Arts, 3, 2, pp.279-297, Jun. 2014. Accessed: Aug. 1, 2022, doi:10.3390/arts3020279. [Online]. Available: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0752/3/2/279.
[12] P. Cook, Experimental Architecture. New York, USA: Universe Book, 1970.
[13] BldgBlog, G. Manaugh, Without walls: An interview with Lebbeus Woods. (Oct. 3, 2007). Accessed: Aug. 10, 2022 [Online]. Available: https://bldgblog.com/2007/10/without-walls-an-interview-with-lebbeus-woods/.
[14] J. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York, USA: Harper Collins, 1998, p. 97.
[15] M. Pawlyn, Biomimicry in Architecture. Newcastle upon Tyne: RIBA, 2016.
[16] V. Čolić-Damjanovic, I. Gadjanski, “Potentials of fablabs for biomimetic architectural research,” presented at the MEDO, Belgrade, Serbia, Sept. 14-15, 2016, doi:10.1109/MEDO.2016.7746543. Accessed: 1 Aug., 2022. [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7746543.
[17] R. Armstrong, Soft Living Architecture. An Alternative View of Bio-informed Practice. London, UK: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2018, p.23; 83.
[18] L. Fernandéz-Galiano (Ed.), Atlas: Europa Arquitecturas del siglo XXI. Madrid, Spain: Fundación BBVA, 2012.
[19] A. K. Meena, D. C. D’costa, S. S. Bhavsar, M. P. Kshirsagar, S. K. Kulkarni, “Applications of biomimicry in construction and architecture: a bibliometric analysis”, in Library Philosophy and Practice, 5031, Mar. 2021. Accessed: 2 Aug., 2022. [Online]. Available: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/5031/.
[20] J. Burry, J. Sabin, B. Sheil, M. Skavara. Fabricate 2020: Making Resilient Architecture. London, UK: UCL Press, 2020, pp.12-17. [Online]. Available: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13xpsvw.
[21] F. Gramazio, M. Kohler, J. Willmann, The Robotic Touch. How Robots Change Architecture. Zurich: Park Books, CH, 2014.
