ABSTRACT
For twenty-five hundred years, Western artists and designers have been writing about emulating life. The imagery and forms from this tradition show potent hope for inanimate forms of craft and art coming alive. Yet the speech and evocations of visual art and architecture have often treated “life” as a kind of boundary defined by separation and distance from human craft. The symbolism that evokes life has been maintained by distinguishing human artifice from the viable organisms of nature. The discipline of architecture seems to have been especially emphatic in maintaining this divide. Architecture seems a counterform to nature, staying deliberately distinct from the living world, preferring instead the role of a stripped stage that supports the living world by means of clear restraint. Yet the distinct progress of science and technology in recent decades invites a change to this strategy of restraint. The achievement of comprehensive information within the Human Genome Project, the accomplishment of potent learning functions in computational control, and the increasing fluency in programming physical materials and projecting complex-system ecological modeling can conspire to demonstrate that living systems no longer need be maintained as a sacrament separate from human intervention.
