Nature – the oracle of scientific inquiry – carries convincing
vindication for each of her designs: the whiteness of beluga
whales, the smell of sweat, the taste of tears. Her designs
are so perfectly convincing that they apply even to our
cultural environment, which is why Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony makes us cry, or how chisel strokes came to
define typography. Nature is at least 4.5 billion years our
senior; we humans are nothing but a blip in Gaia’s arc.
It is not surprising then, that architects and
designers have looked up to Nature for all things inspiring,
useful and wise. If Nature is to us a 200,000-year-old
Mother, we are her reckless children, testing her patience
by burning coal and feeding the North Pacific trash vortex.
While we, the members of human civilisation, keep busy
growing up – fixing carbon and fighting the coal-burning
culprits – Nature grows old and weary in all meridians,
to the point where she can no longer mother.
I arrived at the Architectural Association in
London the year DNA synthesis was made feasible for
a price of about $1 per base pair and a turnaround time of
less than two weeks. Digital formalisms – designs made
geometrically complex through digital means – resulted
in creations (products, garments, buildings, etc) that were
indeed complex, but only on the surface. All else was
old-style: material applications, assembly methods and
manufacturing traditions were all brought together at the
service of building extravagance just because one could.
How is it, I wondered, that we can engineer yeast for the
commercial production of antimalarial drugs, but we can’t
even vary the density of concrete as a function of load?
In an age when artificial life can be created in vitro
- an age when Nature herself can be mothered by design –
mastering the curve was just not good enough. The
disproportionate balance between innovations achieved
in fields such as synthetic biology, and the virtually primitive
state of digital fabrication as it applied to product and
architectural design, shaped my fundamental ambition as
a designer. Moreover, my professional evolution as an
architect and designer, operating at a time when architects
and designers could digitally conceive almost any complex
product or building form, was – and still is – characterised
by a strong, almost instinctual conviction that the world
of Nature and the world of design must unite to form a
common language. By blurring the techniques and
purposeful expressions embodying formal and material
complexity, the boundaries between the natural and the
artificial must – I felt – become obsolete.
Today, at the height of the Digital Age, I find my
fields of architecture and design constrained by the canon
of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines
still dictate a world made of parts, limiting the imagination
of designers who are indoctrinated to think and make in
terms of discrete elements with distinct functions. Even the
assumption that parts are made from single materials still
goes unchallenged. Yet novel technologies emerging from
the Digital Age are enabling engineering and production
at Mother Nature’s quantum scale, ushering in the next
industrial revolution: the Biological Age.From Machine to Organism
Through our design work and research as part of the MIT’s
Mediated Matter Group, my team and I have expressed a
new model of the world of design: the World-as-Organism.
This new model stands in contrast to the paradigm of the
original Industrial Revolution, or the World-as-Machine.
It strives to impart a living quality into objects, buildings,
and cities. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, which was
ecology-agnostic, this new model, and the revolution under
its wings, are tightly linked to the natural environment.
While we believe this model will eventually become
the new paradigm, it coexists for the time being with the old
archetype; while some of us are already at home in this nascent
world, others still use building practices and design traditions
inherited from the industrial era. At this juncture between
building and growing, activated by our ability to hack natural
processes, we are energised by the possibility of creating
objects – and eventually designing buildings – without parts.From Building to Growing
Novel technologies developed in my group are enabling
design and production at Nature’s scale. We can seamlessly
vary the physical properties of materials at the resolution of
a sperm cell, a blood cell, or a nerve cell. Stiffness, colour,
transparency, conductivity – even smell and taste – can be »Morphological variation studies
for Wanderers – computationally
grown, additively manufactured
and biologically augmented
wearables for the human body.
Informed by natural growth,
computational growth algorithms
are coded, generating a variety
of forms designed to adapt to
a given environment. See page 318
Images throughout: Courtesy of
Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter
Group, MIT Media Lab, unless
otherwise stated
Neri Oxman