Over the past few decades, architecture has birthed a bevy of modifiers and adjectives: sustainable, green, landscape. Unfortunately, their outputs largely remain inadequate at best and palliative at worst. There’s the aesthete camp, armed with green roofs and recycled timber cladding, that can often do more harm than good. There’s the austere contingent, with their holes-for-toilets and twee microhouses, who present neither a scalable solution nor an appealing product, alongside their inverse, who hijack the discourse and its strategies to simply make a buck. And there are the many, both high-profile and low, who’d rather just wash their hands of the issue entirely.
*Toward a Living Architecture?* examines the emerging field of generative architecture and its nexus with computation, biology, and complexity. Based on Christina Cogdell’s field research in architecture studios and biological labs, this book critiques generative architecture by evaluating its scientific rhetoric and disjunction from actual scientific theory and practice, definitively explaining the role of the natural sciences within contemporary architecture.
It is a sign of both a shift in our relationship to organic life and the ubiquity of new information technologies that a young generation of architects has seized...
A lot can be blamed on (or credited to) the currently available tools and the open-source nature of many parametric design tools...
Italian architect Mario Cucinella of Mario Cucinella Architects (MC A) has long been a champion of 3D printing technology. But while architecture students and firms commonly reserve space of their desks for a 3D printer to create high-fidelity scale models as communicative tools, Cucinella has set his sights much higher than the rest.
The design field is at an inflection point. It must challenge its repertoire, rethink technology, and begin to see biodiversity as a building block of urban environments. Julia Watson’s lush and meticulous new book, Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, provides a blueprint for sustainable architecture in the 21st century. For designers of the built environment, …
Enter Julia Watson’s Lo—TEK, a design movement built on indigenous philosophy and vernacular infrastructure to generate sustainable technology..