imagine

this is to just help you think about the potential of active material growth....

Branching with color mutation from flight404 on Vimeo.

This was made by Robert Hodgin, the guy who brought us flight 404, the processing dynamic diagram that mapped all the flights. He uploaded the one above 3 days ago. Branching is pretty great to watch regardless.
This other movie that he uploaded a month ago shows self organizing particles/cells. This was something that I was talking about in the inhabitable organism. The question is, how do we make a material that can be self organizing? Yes there are polymers out there but.. what else?

Organizing from flight404 on Vimeo.

architecture commit suicide!

more to come on Benjamin Bratton's lecture last night. AMAZING... till then watch this series of videos by this eco-energy consultant in SF, Jesse Krieger, as he interviews Dan Winter. Dan writes about the biologic architecture and how sacred geometry is embeded in it. I agree. Look at branching systems! Except I feel that we won't be "designing" per say, just writing the program/code (genetic?) for the growth/structure/skin. Everything else is reaction.

let's talk about fuel baby, let's talk about nano and me...

mmm Do you smell something? Oh wait, it's just the fuel. I know this isn't directly related to bioarchitecture but one might need a biocar to park in a biogarage, and well you get my drift.

So, in an article I was reading on Ecogeek, they were saying how researchers at University of Dayton have been able to use an array of carbon nanotubes to perform the same catalytic activity that Platinum produces in a standard fuel cell. Platinum is good at splitting up the oxygen (O2) molecule into two oxygen ions (O+) at the cell’s cathode. Platinum is a pricey metal if you were not aware and for a typical passenger car, the platinum catalyst can cost about $4,000. That's quite pricey.

The carbon nanotubes are doped with nitrogen. The full name of these wonders are nitrogen-containing carbon nanotubes, or VA-NCNTs. The Nitrogen prevents the carbon from reacting with oxygen to form CO, a process called “poisoning”. The CO builds up on the surface, and reduces the effectiveness of the catalyst over time. But these VA-NCNTs keep carbon unreactive, and thereby prolong the catalyst’s lifetime.
Go carbon!

I want to know though what will the wastes then be? And how can we reuse them?

inhabitable organism_video 1 from nina marie barbuto on Vimeo.


This is the video that I made for my thesis.

more

This is from his myspace::
"PHYSICALLY ALIVE ARCHITECTURE - THE LIVING STRUCTURED ENVIRONMENT (extracts) "Subject: The Vegetable-House as the Answer to Low Cost Housing
The modern movement in architecture is based primarily upon the utopian solution to the most basic of building types: mass-housing. As we enter the Bauharoque Period with its bulging populations, unwinable terrorist wars that seem to keep on escalating, a general and continuous degrading of the world’s natural environment, politics as entertainment and a substitute for religion, or the popular media making money by pitting various interest groups and classes against each other - what could be more plausible than having the world housing shortage ended by simply sowing genetically altered seeds so that houses could be grown almost anywhere on the surface of the earth, with a growing time of approximately two months."

"I believe that if a strategy for mass housing could found, that would involve non-repressive personal environments [ that would avoid mechanical standardization], a base could be established from which other social problems will be solved. Then finally the quest for meaning in existence could gradually replace the goals of our almost complete secular world. To do this requires the total convergence of Science with Mysticism. While this task has already been started a few individuals and groups [beginning in the 19th Century], it will not be until the entire world is involved, will a real change be noticed.

My proposal ,therefore, for ending the world housing shortage is by growing houses from plant materials and developing genetically altered seeds which will induce habitable forms in single multiple species. These forms will then begin to approximate the rich vocabulary of spaces the history of the Human Species has created from the individual home to the city"

"The Conservatory has one basic drawback. It is a building type that requires Human intervention to protect the plant species inside. The purpose of Das Urpflanze Haus or physically alive architecture is to do what all architecture is supposed to do – protect us from an alien environment.

We exist on the Earth because of the existence of Vegetation, not the other way around. Over the aeons we have been weakening the life force of plant materials by protecting them by artificial cultivation techniques and Hot Houses. What we must do is help plant species regain their rightful place in the world as the Prime Species and avail ourselves of their protection and love by willing to fall in love with plant forms and feed ourselves by eating their delicious fruits and nutritious vegetables [ which are seed pods which are produced in an abundance beyond what is necessary for sustainable reproduction]."

YES!!!!!!now to only incorporate the metabolism aspect....

build me up moldy cup

Paul Laffoley was recently brought to my attention. His work is directly related to the inhabitable organism. In fact, it is it! He is describing what I have been trying to get at. First a little bit more about Paul::

He went tot the Harvard's GSD for art in 1963. He was dismissed from there. Why I don't know yet. He then went to NYC to work with Frederick Kiesler. Andy Warhol got a hold of Paul and had him watch a lot of tv. A fact that is quite haunting is that Laffoley worked 18 months on design for the WTC Tower II (floors 15 to 45) with Emery Roth & Sons under the direction of architect Minoru Yamasaki. He was fired by Yamasaki after he suggested that bridges be constructed between the two towers for safety. He returned to Boston after that and started painting.

His highly original approach to the construction of the painted surface is based on extensive hand written journals documenting his research, diagrams, and footnoted predecessors to various theoretical developments. He deals with concepts from time machines to nano laboratories in the brain. JUST AMAZING.

I hope to talk to Paul Laffoley about the growing buildings. He even said, you'd get some seeds and in a few months you'd have something. That's one of the points I had in my movie. How do we make this real? How does one bring this to the attention of the public with out them running off? Let's get Paul Stamets and Laffoley in a room and grow something.