Hylozoic Ground: Liminal Responsive Architecture


Book Description

The Hylozoic Soil experimental architecture series developed by architect Philip Beesley and engineer Rob Gorbet has been expanded and refined by researchers, engineers and designe rs from around the world. An interactive geotextile mesh that senses human occupants, Hylozoic Soil transforms a static building into a responsive environment, filling it with a kind of mechanical empathy. The space functions like a giant lung that breathes in and out around its occupants in peristaltic waves of lightweight pores. With contributions by:Will Elsworthy, Rob Gorbet, Jonah Humphrey, Hayley Isaacs, and Christian Joakim. Project selected as Canada's Venice Biennale entry for 2010.




Hylozoic Ground


Book Description




The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture


Book Description

The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture collects thirty essays from a transdisciplinary array of experts on biology in art and architecture. The book presents a diversity of hybrid art-and-science thinking, revealing how science and culture are interwoven. The book situates bioart and bioarchitecture within an expanded field of biology in art, architecture, and design. It proposes an emergent field of biocreativity and outlines its historical and theoretical foundations from the perspective of artists, architects, designers, scientists, historians, and theoreticians. Includes over 150 black and white images.




Architecture and Adaptation


Book Description

Architecture and Adaptation discusses architectural projects that use computational technology to adapt to changing conditions and human needs. Topics include kinetic and transformable structures, digitally driven building parts, interactive installations, intelligent environments, early precedents and their historical context, socio-cultural aspects of adaptive architecture, the history and theory of artificial life, the theory of human-computer interaction, tangible computing, and the social studies of technology. Author Socrates Yiannoudes proposes tools and frameworks for researchers to evaluate examples and tendencies in adaptive architecture. Illustrated with more than 50 black and white images.




Vital Forms


Book Description

Shows how the intersection of biotech, art, and architecture are transforming the world we live in As living matter becomes more and more the domain of art and architecture, the life sciences are enabling a major cultural and aesthetic transformation. Vital Forms explores how the intersection of biology, art, and architecture has transformed these disciplines, offering heretofore unimagined possibilities. Using numerous case studies, Jennifer Johung explores how art and architecture are reimagining life on cellular and subcellular levels. In the process, she maps the constantly evolving dependencies that exist between objects, bodies, and environments. From Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr’s Tissue Culture and Art Project, which developed “semi-living worry dolls,” to Patricia Piccinini’s imagined Still Life with Stem Cells, each chapter pairs a branch of contemporary biological inquiry with the artists who are revolutionizing it. Examining cutting-edge developments in biotechnological research—including tissue-engineering, stem cell science, regenerative medicine, and more—Vital Forms brings biological art and architecture into critical dialogue. Distinguished by its broad range and Johung’s synthesizing talents, Vital Forms makes powerful observations about how the unfolding dependencies between all kinds of matter are becoming vital to life in our age of biotechnological manipulations.




Architecture in Digital Culture


Book Description

This book examines the manifestations of architecture, cities, and design processes within digital culture. Adopting a comparative and critical method, the author looks at past and present encounters of the digital with architectural discourse and practice. Along three central themes – machines, networks, and computation – the book begins by discussing transformations of the analogy between architecture and the machine since the early twentieth century, foregrounding questions about the relations between architecture, humans, machines, and the environment. It moves on to the city, to observe how big data and smart city sustainable management systems have transformed historical visions of global networked cities. Lastly, it explores computational design thinking historically and in the context of complex systems, as well as the latest technical, social, and economic developments. Exposing possible drawbacks while still focusing on what is radically innovative, this book proposes a way toward more liberating, digital, and sustainable futures for architecture. An important read for architecture students, academics, and professionals, this book connects instances of digital architecture practice and discourse throughout the history of the digital culture paradigm and their ties with sociopolitical developments. It shares the possibility that these connecting lines may be the canvas for a novel architectural history of the recent past.




Responsive Landscapes


Book Description

The sensing, processing, and visualizing that are currently in development within the environment boldly change the ways design and maintenance of landscapes are perceived and conceptualised. This is the first book to rationalize interactive architecture and responsive technologies through the lens of contemporary landscape architectural theory. Responsive Landscapes frames a comprehensive view of design projects using responsive technologies and their relationship to landscape and environmental space. Divided into six insightful sections, the book frames the projects through the terms; elucidate, compress, displace, connect, ambient, and modify to present and construct a pragmatic framework in which to approach the integration of responsive technologies into landscape architecture. Complete with international case studies, the book explores the various approaches taken to utilise responsive technologies in current professional practice. This will serve as a reference for professionals, and academics looking to push the boundaries of landscape projects and seek inspiration for their design proposals.




Vibrant Architecture


Book Description

This book sets out the conditions under which the need for a new approach to the production of architecture in the twenty-first century is established, where our homes and cities are facing increasing pressures from environmental challenges that are compromising our lives and well being. Vibrant architecture embodies a new kind of architectural design practice that explores how lively materials, or 'vibrant matter', may be incorporated into our buildings to confer on them some of the properties of living things, such as movement, growth, sensitivity and self-repair. The theoretical and practical implications of how this may occur are explored through the application of a new group of materials. Characteristically, these substances possess some of the properties of living systems but may not have the full status of being truly alive. They include forms of chemical artificial life such as 'dynamic droplets' or synthetically produced soils. As complex systems, they are able to communicate directly with the natural world using a shared language of chemistry and so, negotiate their continued survival in a restless world. Vibrant architecture may create new opportunities for architectural design practice that venture beyond top-down form-finding programs, by enabling architects to co-design in partnership with human and nonhuman collectives, which result from the production of post natural landscapes. Ultimately, vibrant architecture may operate as an ecological platform for human development that augments the liveliness of our planet, rather than diminishes it.




Interactive Design


Book Description

Designers and forward thinkers in the field of interactive design share their reflections and show examples of different models of a responsive future environment. Interactive design has exploded in recent years with a number of inspiring projects that have opened up a new field of research and design. This book brings together some of the most prominent actors and thinkers in the field of interactive design, with theoretical articles highlighting different aspects of this work and describing them through current practices and projects. Supplemented with numerous illustrations, this book offers an overview of the emergence of interactive design and architecture based on the theory of cybernetics. At the same time, it introduces models of interactivity ranging from dynamic and shapechanging materials to wearables, architecture, and transdisciplinary and alternative design methods. History of the development of interactive design Overview of the state of the art and its possibilities Models of interactivity in theory and practice




Built, Unbuilt and Imagined Sydney


Book Description

Built, Unbuilt, and Imagined Sydney presents the expanded field of architecture. It aims to show that the practice of architecture exceeds the work legally defensible under the title of the architect. Besides the design and construction of buildings, the disciplinary field of architecture consists of exhibition and display; discussions and lectures; competitions and visions of new public domains; interactions between art and architecture in the form of installations, performances, and public art; and ideas on new directions for the practice of architecture. The book, therefore, places emphasis on practice as an intellectual activity, in addition to the definition of the term informed by business and legal parameters. It is seen as the meaningful exercise of social, political, and critical knowledge, skills, and mindset in an urban, spatial, and tectonic condition. The practice is also a public act, mediated, legitimated, and made meaningful through its articulation in various institutional, public, and mediatic realms. The book focuses on built and unbuilt works (residential, commercial, interiors, and so on) in Sydney, inclusive of public art, object or furniture design, key invited or public lectures, studios, current projects in making, competitions, collaborations, exhibitions, installations, and outreach work. The focus is on the innovative and the original¾not the ordinary or the purely commercial.