You seem to have a wide range of work addressing this, from Living Light in Seoul, South Korea, which is a pavilion that lights up in response to air-quality levels and is more of an installation-type application, to the idea of a more ingrained response, where the actual mechanical systems of a building react to environmental conditions.
Those are two great examples. We’ve also expanded that to explore non-digital-responsive systems such as how a building fits into its larger ecosystem and the consumption of resources. One thing we’ve been exploring for a couple of clients is the idea of defining new equations of sustainability by emphasizing reuse of building materials. One of these projects involves creating what we’re calling the House of Doors. It’s an artist studio in upstate New York made out of 90 percent salvaged building materials, including 380 metal and wood doors from a hotel renovation that otherwise would have ended up in a landfill.
This encompasses your work both at The Living and at GSAPP?
Yes. Our projects have interesting relationships and interdependencies between the professional work and academic research. We have a diagram for our work as a whole, both at The Living and at the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia, and it’s a diagram of interconnected loops and flows that’s loosely inspired by the carbon cycle. We think of the design process itself as being an ecosystem of competing and cooperating forces. We then think of each project as a loop that is part of the interconnected ecosystem. The projects that are part of The Living as a professional entity influence the research at the lab in an academic environment and vice versa.
How would you define synthetic biology and how is it relevant to building-design professionals such as architects?
It’s complex. Synthetic biology is a new approach to engineering biology, and it grows out of several new technologies and this incredible convergence of different disciplines. But the bottom line is that it’s now possible for the first time to design new living organisms to perform useful and sustainable tasks. Even more fascinating for me is that it’s now becoming possible for nonspecialists, such as architects, to think about designing with biology. Because a lot of the performance of this new biological technology is encapsulated in standard parts, it’s possible for nonspecialists to think about putting together these parts without knowing the detailed functioning of the individual parts themselves.
That’s abstract. To make it immediate to architecture, a couple of things have been fascinating and inspiring to me. One is that a lot of people are saying that if the previous century was the century of physics and invention, then the current century, the 21st, is the century of biology. Many of the next-generation technologies that will affect many things, including buildings, will be from the domain of biology.
More immediately, a couple of people in this field are saying that within 20 years synthetic biology will be the way we make everything. It’s a potential manufacturing platform. A friend of mine who is a biologist says to think of it this way: The cheapest way to make anything is to grow it. If we can start tinkering with the basic building blocks of biological systems or organisms so that we can grow things that are slightly more helpful to us in solving problems, then it could immediately affect the built environment and a lot of architectural technologies.
Amphibious Architecture (New York, 2009) from David Benjamin on Vimeo.