Wallpaper 10

resolution across material platforms: fibres, cellular solids,
biopolymers, inter alia.

I am excited about our transition to the architectural
scale as much as I am provoked by the notion of revisiting
altogether what it means to set up a different kind of
architectural practice. One that considers the environment
as its main client, and the client as its enabler. This entails
building a new kind of practice that is less concerned
with objects and more with systems: technological,
organisational, social.

In a systems view there is little room for categorical
delineation: achieving world peace, eliminating poverty,
or curing cancer. Rather, the designer authors systems to
address manifold issues, across scales and disciplines, from
curing malaria to populating Mars. Now that is real scale.

Thomas Heatherwick is a designer and founder
of Heatherwick Studio

HASHIM SARKIS

Design & Systems

HS What happens to our design values when we

transition from thinking about designing objects

to designing systems? Are the two value systems

incompatible? Will our sense of what is good

design and bad design change? Will our sense of

aesthetics change?

NEO Shifting from structures to systems (or from object
to objectile) is a big deal. It’s like shifting from the geocentric
to the heliocentric paradigm during the Copernican
revolution. The focus on systems, not objects, calls the
designer to assume a bigger identity, one that is less about
human-centric choices and more about societal impact
and connectivity.

Designs that are system-driven, like the iPhone or the
Parthenon, are larger than themselves. The former is at once
an interface, a technology and ‘object of desire’. The latter
is at once a building and an embodiment of democracy.
One Laptop Per Child is another great example: a product
that offered new ways of learning; an educational system
wrapped in a portable laptop that can also function as a light
source in a sub-Saharan African living room.

Hashim Sarkis is an architect and founder of Hashim Sarkis Studios
and dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT

MOSHE SAFDIE

Design & Ecology

MS What breakthrough do you believe will enable

Material Ecology to be applied to architecture?

NEO The ability to digitally fabricate or construct at

nature’s scale (mechanics, optics, etc) will enable architects

to overcome the existing dimensional mismatch between

physical matter (eg, sheet glass, homogeneous concrete,

single property metals) and environmental forces (eg, variable

load, variable heat) by offering methods and technologies

for digitally designing and fabricating variable-property

structures (eg, variable optics glass, variable density concrete,

variable strength metals). Harnessing solar energy on urban

scales using glass 3D-printing in the creation of urban scale

transparent ‘computers’ would be one such breakthrough.

In the biological world, you find that structures are

optimised for a multiplicity of simultaneous functions across

scales: structural load, environmental pressures, spatial

constraints, and so on (consider a living tree). But in the

designed world it is not yet possible to match the resolution

and sophistication of the natural world. Bricks are dumber

than cells, and synthetic fibres are yet to fire electrical

signals into the textiles they inhabit. Biology is still far more

refined and sophisticated than material practices dealing in

polymers, concrete, steel and glass. »

Oxman and members of The Mediated
Matter Group seen through Aguahoja

Photography: Paula Aguilera and
Jonathan Williams. Courtesy of
Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter
Group, MIT Media Lab

∑ 331