ARCHITECTURE & SCALE

The London Based Collective EAT, of which I am part of, gave a Lecture in Greewinch University last friday invited by Professor Neil Spiller and Phil Watson. This essay, on Architecture and Scale, was part of that lecture.

Scale entails a deep history in architectural practice, rooted in the resolution of scope that architects decide to use: continents, oceans, cities, buildings, rooms, carpets, micro-landscapes and medico-landscapes. In contemporary architecture scale is no longer a standardized order in the classical sense, but is used as an ordering system that can stem from musical theory, number patterns, ratios, mathematical equations an a myriad of more abstract and sometimes even mystical investigations. EAT operates and places itself within four distinctive relational parameters of scale, these are: the micro-scale, the medium or human scale, macro-scale and moment-time scale. Rapid developments in technology in the areas of biology, nano-technology, chemistry and medicine have demanded the attention of architecture and are being investigated by architects using design as a research method to explore and manipulate actual biological material sometimes at the molecular level. Biological and natural principles have long been used as a model in architecture in a variety of ways, anthropomorphic principles have long been applied to buildings supposedly establishing a formal link between nature and architecture.

The following 3 projects, of which the first is Adam Phillips’s “The 3rd Degree; Secrecy & the Consequences of Promiscuous Technology”, developed as part of the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research Lab, were conceived through a bottom-up approach to architectural design; using living technologies at the micro-scale, most of them viewable only through the microscope, the designers generated proposals that travelled in scale from the petri dish to a building, an industrial district and ultimately the vast North Pacific Ocean.

Adam’s is a research based design project that stemmed from earlier fascination and research in self-organizing, bottom-up biological systems and how they could possibly influence new parameters within architecture. It started in a micro-biology lab where the growth, documentation and analysis of slime mould encouraged the creation of a speculative architectural living technology, a Material Internet, where the cellular rhythm of slime-mould was harnessed as a biological social-networking system and accessed and deployed through the alchemical relationship it has with gold, essentially communicating through the gold surfaces within Freemason’s Hall, in London’s Covent Garden. As a living technology, it is reliant on atmospheric changes to flourish or hibernate. Changes that are induced by fluctuations with light, temperature and moisture, are quintessential environmental elements used as a method of control by the way a human engages it through an architectural interaction with their body at incremental points in the building. Through the body’s senses, and the technology that senses the body, this scale of interaction is used as a moment, an event, designed by the architect at the microscopic, cellular-scale, intending for the consequences of the users interaction with it to be spread throughout the architectural body of the building.

The second project, designed by Ju, examines the reconciliation between the industrial society and the natural world, presented as a fictional narrative that articulates a cyanobacteria growing as an architectural first aid kit, in the abandoned and deteriorated district of Silvertown in East London. Once again, this project begins at the micro-scale, it uses chemical equipments and biological knowledge instead of conventional architectural methods and develops from scientific phenomenon and theory, using computer scripting, low technological experiments and an elaborate narrative to produce a metabolic material technology. This semi-living unicellular organism is fertilized using a simple combination of cyanobacteria as sperm, and protocells acting as ovum. When the embryos mature, the organisms multiply rapidly and then absorb existing building materials such like limestone, brick and concrete while rebuilding a new structure.

The speed at which this occurs is relatively is low, but by operating the system on a much larger area, a London district,Ju enables the effects to be felt and realized on an urban scale. The project performs as an environmental first-aid kit to protect London against future flooding. This narrative is visualized through the intense and emotional drawings depicting the system as a whole, its various organs, and the dream that comes with imagining a new type of sustainable architecture.

My project, Plastic Fantastic, as with the previous projects was designed through a bottom up approach, analyzing in the fist instance mineralization processes, specifically the process of crystallization, as the project developed, the specific self-assembling qualities of molecules during the process of crystallization were of special interest and became central to the project. Self-assembly is defined: the autonomous organization of components into patterns or structures without human intervention. Self-assembling processes are common throughout nature and technology. They involve components from the molecular scale (crystals) to the planetary scale (weather systems) and many different kinds of interactions. The concept of self assembly is used increasingly in many disciplines, with a different flavor and emphasis in each.

Research and exploration with self–assembling processes makes evident how scale, both in size and time, is an essential element to investigate in order to develop a bottom-up design approach to an architectural proposal. The study of natural phenomena, like the giant crystals of the Naica cave in Mexico, consisting of giant gypsum crystals measuring up to 11m and with weights of up to 30 tons, compared with small sized crystals artificially grown in my kitchen, and a careful analysis of a number of experiments done on the influence of shape on self-assembly helps to understand and overcome the scale problem involved in utilizing a phenomenon that is generally found to happen in the micro scale and to blow it up to human and macro scale.

The project speculates on the deployment of protocells in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Protocells are self assembling chemical systems without any DNA, and are made of only a small number of simple chemicals you might find at any home. The Patch, a giant accumulation of man made debris, predominantly millimeter sized plastic particles suspended in the upper water column covers an area though to be about 8 times the size of Britain. The technology, developed in the micro scale is applied to an area that covers millions of square kilometers of open ocean.

The protocells, through self-assembly trap and bind the floating neuston plastics, creating a series of floating islands, a complex synthetic ecology where a new social, economic and political order is formulated.

This three projects show how scale is not really a measure or a dimension, but a capacity for relation. The dynamic systems that govern our world and the geometries of the structures associated with them, give rise to scalar relations among themselves.

Commonly expressed in contemporary architecture we find scaled-up analogies between natural biological conditions and larger scale structures, this experimentation with bio-architectural composites has given rise to a number of different responses and approaches from bio-mimicry to neo-plasmatic design and protocell architecture, and thanks to advanced digital design technologies and representation techniques, were opened the door to a world, in which interdisciplinary practice with physicians, biologists, chemists and bio-engineers is becoming not only increasingly common but necessary.