Epiphyte Chamber

Can architecture integrate living functions? Waterloo University’s Living Architecture Systems Group (LASG) is developing a series of hybrid physical environments and control systems with living qualities. These built environments can move, respond, and learn; renew themselves with chemical exchanges; and adapt and show empathetic exchanges with their inhabitants.¹ LASG defines “living architecture” as the integration of living and near-living qualities into our built environment through the integration of technological systems, human–computer interactions and living biosystems within next-generation physical structures. What emerges is a new generation of architectural environments.² These environments are composed of many thousands of individual digitally fabricated metal, acrylic, mylar, and glass elements. The massive replication of components is organized within tension-based resilient scaffolds, creating diffusive boundaries between occupants and the surrounding milieu. LASG environments are based on designs that seek to maximize interchange with the atmosphere and occupants. LASG design paradigms that are guided by a pursuit of qualities lying far from equilibrium. Designs are based on deeply reticulated, regenerative envelopes, or skins, which wrap a building like a sheath and contrast the minimum surface exposure of reductive crystal forms used in much of contemporary building designs that maximize territory and inertia while minimizing exposure to a structure’s surroundings.³ The prototypical spaces use an array of interconnected, interactive, intelligent components that are interconnected by lightweight kinetic scaffolds and integrated with massively distributed proprioreceptive sensor networks. The interactive environments contain large arrays of actuators and sensors that are linked together by networks of nodes. Synthetic biology is housed in fluid-bearing vessels supporting first generations of chemical metabolisms. This combination of computational and physical systems creates substantial complexity and unpredictability.