ABSTRACT
In a seminal essay entitled “There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom: An Invitation to Enter a New Field of Physics” (1959), the late physicist Richard Feynman introduced nanotechnology: fabrications assembled at the atomic level.1 The invisible scales frequently elude us, but once realized, present many opportunities. Architecture and its companion design professions, those that build out the environments that humans inhabit, are focused on the human scale, on communities, landscapes, cities and regions, and in the main are blissfully unaware of the revolution that is happening below. The growing realization of the spectacular diversity of phyla, species, and strains of micro-organisms and their ubiquity, and even more so, the deep interrelationship between humans and microbes, demands that designers also become aware of these relationships and begin to use them as positive assets in their configuration of the world. But in order to do so, we must come to understand this scale as one that harbors not only danger, but also significant opportunity.
