Page 64 - META

64
ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
lines that bio-integration of organic substances or biological organisms can bring architecture closer to establish a mutualistic symbiosis, rather than a parasitic rela- tionship with the biosphere.
Conclusions
In the current era, marked by an increasing environmental concern, urban ecology becomes an important goal to achieve and it forces us to think about current design methods which are not ecologically aware of natural resources, nor adequately inte- grated into ecosystems.
The eco-symbiosis perspective applied to architecture can in fact help us to include in our future cities ecological dynamics of responsiveness and metabolism and to build positive relationships between living organisms and the abiotic forces of our cities. Moreover, by emancipating architecture and design from a mere objectifica- tion, we can start conceiving built environment as assemblage of meta-living organ- isms thanks to biosynthesis.
This new field of research seems very promising, even if at this stage there still few implementations at the architectural scale and designers are more focused on the production of prototypes which are generally unrelated to the more purely archi- tectural field, as they seem to be halfway between an artistic, scientific and design project.
However, we can detect also some disadvantages related to this practice, which are mainly economical since the costs for the synthesis and maintainance of biomaterials still relevantly high. The use of biological organisms coupled with artificial materi- als could also generate unforeseen circumstances related to the inpredictability of living systems and this is certainly something that will need further elaboration in order to reach a certain stability at the architectural and urban scale. Another possi- bile implication could be the reducing of these experimentations to the umpteenth way of technical manipulation and exploitation of living systems, ecologies, and the biosphere at large.
References
Abondano D. (2015) “Transition towards a digital architecture: new conceptions on materiality and nature” in Moras A., Voyatzaki, M. (eds) archi-DOCT vol. 2(2)/ Febru- ary 2015: 29-42.
Armstrong, R. et. al. (2011) “A manifesto for protocell architecture: against biological formalism” in Spiller, N. and Armstrong, R. (eds), AD: Protocell Architecture, 81, 2, pp. 24-25
Armstrong, R. (2014) “Designing with Protocells: Applications of a Novel Technical Platform” in Life, 4, pp. 457-490. doi:10.3390/life4030457.
Bandura, A. (2006) “Toward a psychology of human agency” in Perspectives on Psy- chological Science, 1, pp. 164-180.
//
Architecture in a Petri dish: co-programming Meta-Life in design through biointegration and synthetic biology
Selenia Marinelli