Fishing for the New Architectural School by Melissa Sterry, Published February 2012.

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The bottom of an ocean may not strike you as an obvious place to look when researching the city of the future. What could you possibly learn about this city from the study of aquatic life? A futurist cum design scientist, I spend a lot time reading papers, reports and presentations about future cities. However, from this mountain of research, I cite only a molehill, for the greater majority of these proposals merely dress up the old built-environment paradigm and parade it as the new – the wolves in sheep’s clothing of sustainability.

Cast your mind back over the history of architecture and design. Mentally walk through the various schools, thinking about how one differentiated from another. Regardless of the century, the civilization or the continent, if you progress through the various styles in order, a distinct trend will emerge. Both technologically and aesthetically, design styles tend to swing from one extreme to another. This is a trend we see in all forms of cultural expression, from music to fashion, dance to art. While technological innovations can, and often do, shape our aesthetic preferences, the street between technology and taste isn’t one-way. Many of the sustainability concepts being touted as ‘new’ are in fact vintage – ideas

that are years, decades, in some instances centuries old. Consequently we are currently sat atop an innovation bottleneck. All that is required to unleash the potential of hundreds, thousands, possibly even tens of thousands of sustainability inventions, is a cultural shift in their favour.

Open, undetermined & explorative design While smart materials, Adaptatronics (adaptive structure technology) and Bionics (also known as Biomimetics, Biomimicry and Biognosis) have all been around for some time, it’s only now that humanity is getting serious about tackling sustainability challenges that such innovations are migrating en masse to market. However, as Dr Tuba Kocaturk pointed out in a lecture we gave earlier this month on Design Futures, for the CIOB at the University of Salford, attempting to fit this new school of technologies into the existing built-environment paradigm is like trying to put a square peg into a round hole. In his recent paper ‘Biomimetic design processes in architecture; morphogenetic and evolutionary computational design’, Achim Menges highlighted how ‘open, undetermined and explorative’ design and engineering approaches are imperative to the application of intelligent materials and systems. However, postulation is easier than practice, especially when unlike the presenters on Blue Peter, we have not the benefit of a project someone, somewhere “did earlier”.

Back to the ocean… what nuggets of knowledge about future cities can we fish from the Big Blue? Whether or not their overall design, or an element of it, is sourced directly through Biomimetic processes, a great many of the most disruptive technologies coming to the fore in architecture mimic the Natural World. Historically the technological has been the antithesis of the biological, sharing few if any characteristics; therein the new wave of technology simply doesn’t wash with today’s predominant design, engineering and construction practices. However, dive into the ocean and you will find limitless examples that indicate how the ilk of smart materials could shape the city of the future, so let’s do just that…

Self-repairing & resilient materialsUnknown to science until the 1990s, Thaumoctopus mimicus – the Mimic Octopus, lives in the tropical seas of Southeast Asia and is the first member of the cephalopod family to have been observed impersonating other animals. Able to mimic sea snakes, lionfish, jellyfish, stingrays, flatfish, flounders, sea anemones, giant crabs and brittle stars, the octopus can instantly change its shape, its colour and its markings, to take on the form of a creature, often a poisonous one, that will deflect a predator. While the only predators your average building need deflect are insects, such as woodboring beetles and termites, there are potential advantages

to embedding behaviors similar to those of the Mimic Octopus within our urban habitats. Structurally adaptive, chromataphoric (colour-changing) smart materials and building envelopes could, in theory, endow man-made structures with one of the core characteristics of living things - Homeostasis - the ability of an organism to regulate its own internal environment.However, to be truly life-life, as does the skin of the

Mimic Octopus, such materials would also perform several other tasks; such as self-repair, communicate with their surroundings and provide resilience to external threats. They may additionally embed a feature found in another aquatic species, Ostreidae, the Oyster, which as filter feeder helps to cleanse the ocean of excessive sediment, nutrients, and algae. Pollution-busting building materials is a concept being explored by my AVATAR group colleague Dr Rachel Armstrong, who is researching the potential of protocell technology that harvests and stores environmental pollutants through chemical processes. Several other research projects are exploring the potential of smart materials to harvest and filter water from rainfall, snow and fog, which if successful could help tackle water shortages.

A much broader spectrum of possibilityA fellow shape-shifting oceanic companion of the Mimic Octopus is Tetraodontidae, the Pufferfish, which has the capacity to rapidly inflate its stomach so as to become too large for its predators to eat. Adapting this defense mechanism to the built environment, we see it expressed in smart materials and building envelopes that expand and retract in response to changing heat and humidity levels. This property, especially when aligned with chromataphoric sensitivity to sunlight and humidity levels, could enable constant and accurate passive management of interior temperature and air quality. While bioluminescence is a very rare characteristic

in land-dwelling species, it’s commonplace in the ecosystems that inhabit the ocean’s deepest depths. Created through a chemical reaction called

chemiluminescence, in which chemical energy converts to radiant energy, bioluminescence enables organisms to generate their own light, be it to attract prey, detract a predator or communicate both with its own species and others. One of the most beautiful creatures to exhibit this ability is Aurelia aurita, more commonly known as the Moon Jellyfish, which has become a pin-up girl of marine ecology journals. A growing number of scientists, artists and designers are experimenting with bioluminescent materials, in particular novel aesthetic applications. However, chemiluminescence processes present a much broader spectrum of possibility, such as the potential to develop materials that provide kinetically-triggered emergency lighting during power outages caused by both natural and man-made hazards, such as seismic activity and explosions.

The aesthetic and the functionalOne by one, the dots in the smart materials picture are being joined, as breakthroughs in micro-engineering merge with those in nano-electronics, sensory technology and computational design. Of the research projects exploring the potential of this interdisciplinary space, Biornametics – Architecture Defined by Natural Patterns, is one of the few to place equal emphasis on the aesthetic and the functional. Led by Dr Barbara Imhof and Dr Petra Gruber of the University of Applied Arts, it seeks to explore a new methodology to interconnect scientific evidence with creative design in architecture. Biornametics acknowledges the fact that living systems have evolved a process of continuing adaptation to a complex and changing environment. Along with my own research project, The Bionic City, for which I’m investigating the potential of building a Biomimetic blueprint for urban resilience to natural hazards, Imhof and Gruber’s project is one of the few that truly challenges the traditional built-environment paradigm – rejecting some of the most fundamental assumptions that underpin the most common design, engineering and construction practices.

More than metaphorsThe ocean floor isn’t a natural habitat for Homo sapiens, a matter of which we are acutely aware during our brief, technologically facilitated visits. The expanse of water on Earth is so vast and our exploration of it so little, that we know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the watery depths of our blue planet. However, oceans have hosted life for 3.8bn years, sustaining it through multiple planetary-wide catastrophes that wiped out most land-dwelling species, therein are worthy of our exploration and consideration. In marine species we find more than metaphors, as they illustrate living technologies with greater efficiency, resilience and sophistication than anything humanity has yet created. Ocean ecosystems, in particular coral reefs, are amongst the most complex adaptive systems in existence, comprising myriad mutually beneficial symbiotic relationships, in many cases numbering a wider community of species than we have yet recorded, let alone studied in such detail as to fully understand. Unlike many other futurists, I very much doubt that our future cities will sit atop or below the oceans’ waves, considering most such proposals to be technically naïve and conceptually flawed. However, there are a great many subtle ways in which our future cities could find solutions below the water line. At a time when the ilk of James Hansen and Professor John Beddington fear humanity could be rapidly sinking out of its depth, what better place to fish for a brighter future?

Melissa Sterry, Director and Head of Technology at Earth2Hub Ltd, PhD Researcher at the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research group at University of Greenwich and Visiting Fellow at the University of Salford.

FISHING FOR THE NEW ARCHITECTURAL SCHOOL

Materials that are self-repairing, regulate internal environments, and communicate with their surroundings – dive into the ocean and you will find limitless examples that indicate how the ilk of smart materials could shape the city of the future. Your diving guide is Melissa Sterry…