Living Construction

Martyn Dade-Robertson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429777073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

Modern biotechnologies give us unprecedented control of the fundamental building blocks of life. For designers, across a range of disciplines, emerging fields such as synthetic biology offer the promise of new sustainable materials and structures which may be grown, are self-assembling, self-healing and adaptable to change. While there is a thriving speculative discourse on the future of design in the age of biotechnology, there are few realized design applications.

This book, the first in the Bio Design series, acts as a bridge between design speculation and scientific reality and between contemporary design thinking, in areas such as architecture, product design and fashion design, and the traditional engineering approaches which currently dominate biotechnologies. Filled with real examples, Living Construction reveals how living cells construct and transform materials through methods of fabrication and assembly at multiple scales and how designers can utilize these processes.

Introduction
Chapter 1

GROWING BUILDINGS

In 2010, an article in the Mail Online presented the work of a group of students who, the headline claimed, had developed a “glue made from genetically-modified bacteria that can knit cracks in concrete back together” (Firth, 2010). The undergraduate team, composed of bioscientists and computer scientists as well as engineers, were pioneers in a new field called synthetic biology. They had won a gold medal in the International Competition for Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) by designing and building a living system composed of bacteria cells which were capable of swimming deep into microscopic concrete cracks and then, using a chemical signalling process known as quorum sensing, commencing a process of biomineralization. In addition, the cells would excrete a biological glue and become filamentous, growing into long fibrous strands. Through this process, cracks in reinforced concrete, which otherwise would have caused water ingress to rust the steel tension bars, would be intelligently filled.

I read a version of this article on the Newcastle University news feed and was intrigued. The work had been conducted in a lab less than five minutes’ walk from my office, and my first reaction was to ask why no one from my School (of Architecture, Planning and Landscape) was involved.

A few months later, I found myself at a conference (where I delivered a paper on a very different topic) gossiping with delegates about the iGEM project, and the science fiction fan in me began to project possible scenarios. If you could repair concrete with bacteria, why not propose a world in which buildings would be grown using the same approach?

LIVING ARCHITECTURE

Nine years later, after completing a master’s degree in synthetic biology, running a small, but rapidly growing, microbiology lab and conducting a first tentative set of experiments, I began to seek out a community of like-minded researchers. Whilst this area of research was lacking an established scientific community, I discovered a growing collection of speculative projects and practitioners in the field of living architectures. Communicating as much through TED talks and blog posts as research journals, a new generation of architectural designers had begun to speculate on a future in which our buildings would be grown from living cells, self-assembled and responsive to their environment, capable of adapting to change, self-healing and even capable of reproduction. However, while these visions were often inspiring, they can become disconnected from scientific and biological reality. They offer speculation on the what?, sometimes the why?, but rarely the how? Too often, dreams of living architectures are associated with notions of biological form or computational and generative architecture. As Cogdell points out in her critique of living architectures, terms such as genetic or morphogenesis, borrowed from biological textbooks, often become confused and misused (2018). At worst, living architectures offer empty renderings based on what Michel Hensel describes as the “superficial biomorphic formal repertoire” (2006). Speculation in itself is not a problem. Design is inevitably a speculative act. Architecture has thrived on cultural and technical speculation, but it is a tough reality that few designers have access to the skills or resources required to carry out the sorts of experiments necessary to move beyond speculation.

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY

If the answers to the how are not to be found in design speculation, then perhaps they lie in synthetic biology. Synthetic biology (at least in its most contemporary formulation) uses the tools of molecular biology together with the principles and language of traditional engineering. Biological systems are described in terms of interchangeable parts and hierarchies of abstraction as systems are built from simple components to complex wholes (Benner and Sismour, 2005). In the narrative offered by synthetic biology, biological systems can be redesigned along more logical and elegant lines and be made predictable and precise.

Practitioners in the field of synthetic biology benefit from access to wet labs and substantial research resources but are, in other ways, also profoundly limited. The technologies offered by synthetic biology are modest and the approaches are gene centric, rendering living cells as wetware machines running on a software code of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Time spent at a lab bench reveals that this software code can (after many hours of work) be edited to, for example, engineer a bacteria to produce a new protein or to respond to simple environmental cues, but there are no genes to assemble a few billion bacteria into a cuboid to produce a brick, let alone a building.

A NEW APPROACH?

For me, as an architect, an irony of the study of synthetic biology is that at the same time as the discipline is looking to frame biology through methods derived from industrial engineering, designers in my field are often using biology as a way of critiquing traditional engineering approaches to design. Bioinspired and biomimetic design often cites biology as offering a fundamentally different logic of material construction. This discourse can be found, for example, in discussions of material ecology and material computation in the work of Oxman (2010) and Menges (2012) and of self-assembly in the work of Tibbits (2017) and in the experimental architectures of Armstrong (2015). In referring to nature’s materials and structures, they cite the seamless way in which multiscale biological materials are formed into complex multiscale structures. By seeking inspiration from biology, designers frequently make references to the complexity of biological systems, their interconnectedness with their environment and ecologies and their irreducibility to parts and hierarchies.

BIOLOGICAL DESIGN

The absence of a firm knowledge base for their work doesn’t stop a steady and growing stream of design students approaching me and my colleagues wanting to know how they might make their design speculations real. These students are operating in a new field of Bio Design, a context which encompasses architecture, fashion design, interaction design and product design, among others. These new bio designers are not satisfied with speculation alone. They want to make. They see the lab as a potential extension of their studios and workshops. However, the incredible complexity, not just of biology but of the way in which biological knowledge is codified, is daunting. To the students who want to grow a building canopy with bacteria, produce cellulose or grow a meat house, my answer is invariably: ‘it’s a bit more complicated than that’.

Most students, horrified by the pile of scientific papers we give them, and the realization that success in my group is often measured in material samples of a few micrometres, retreat back to Gaudi-like renderings of future living buildings grown through as yet undefined technologies. Some, however, persevere. These brave souls persist, cementing ammonia-smelling sand columns with Sporosarcina pasteurii, growing cellulose membranes with kombucha tea and growing blocks of mycelium (the roots of fungus) on coffee grounds. They may not yet produce buildings, but they get to observe miraculous transformations of matter and exquisite complexity through the lenses of a microscope. Those who stay long enough begin to develop their expertise and manual skills in experimental biology. They also develop an intuition which goes beyond their scientific knowledge to include experimental practices akin to a craft.

To start on this road, however, is challenging. The confusing hype around fields such as synthetic biology and living architecture and the gap between biological reality and speculation is substantial. This book is my attempt to fill this gap. It reflects the way that I have wrestled with the challenges of Bio Design, attempting to translate biological knowledge from fields like synthetic biology into terms and models that, as a design academic, I (and hopefully others) can understand. It is also an attempt to reconcile the richness and complexity of biology with a need to develop formal methods in design by looking towards frameworks that can be taught to others and guide our experiments.

SCOPE OF THE BOOK

Before elaborating on what this book is, it is worth saying what it is not. First, this is not a biological textbook. The way I describe biological processes is simplified, and some of my terms and schematic representations would be alien to biologists. A recurring theme in this book is the relation between the map and the territory. Even simple biological systems such as single-cell bacteria are unimaginably complex, so to navigate the territory of living cells, we need a vast array of maps depending on our navigational needs. If we were to extend the analogy of navigation, then synthetic biologists often make use of maps which are more like subway maps – they tell you little about the territory of the city but give you enough information to travel from place to place along specific routes. Pick up a cell biology textbook, however, and you find an array of detailed representations more like an atlas, which describe the geometry of individual buildings (e.g. the structure of proteins) or topographies of whole cities (e.g. cells). There is no shortcut to understanding the territory of living cells, and there are plenty of good textbooks which act as atlases (I have often used Alberts et al., 2014, for example). This book uses an alternative cartographic language which, through text and diagrams, attempts to describe biological principles through the lens of design, making reference to pattern and form. The book will not, therefore, provide a deep understanding of biological processes but rather a useful set of schematics.

The book will also not provide recipes for biological materials or structures. There are, however, a growing number of DIY biology setups supported by initiatives such as MIT’s Bio Summit, competitions such as iGEM (no date) and the Biodesign Challenge (no date) and methods are also shared in countless blog posts and community resources such as Materiability.com (no date). There are also a growing number of synthetic biology how-to guides including general introductions (Davies, 2018) and practical primers (Baldwin et al., 2009; Kuldell et al., 2015). While I will cite a number of practical examples throughout the book, these are intended simply to ground a set of broader concepts and principles.

What this book will address is the question: How do we construct material structures using biology? With a background in architecture, my interest is in constructing human-scale structures. This book, however, is much broader than that. We have been using nature’s bounty of geological and biological materials in construction for as long as we have been creating buildings. So there is nothing inherently new about this question. We have recognized the qualities of wood as a construction material, harvesting and cutting it into usable forms. In turn, the functional properties of timber have shaped the products made from it, defining the structural spans of timber beams, for example. Biological materials, including but not limited to wood, have proven to be versatile, but our needs have also become more demanding.

With a seemingly unlimited supply of energy and matter, we can demand precision from our materials by applying heat and pressure or changing their chemical structure into new forms. Plastic, after all, is actually a biological material made, most often, from hydrocarbons from oil, but, in its highly processed state, it has become something synthetic, gaining new properties which make it highly versatile. Energy and matter, however, are not inexhaustible, at least in the way we currently use them. Plastics have proven to be highly problematic, requiring large amounts of energy in their production (Johnson, 2015), and moving away from their original biological source has meant that the resulting material is resilient in ways which are incompatible with our ecosystem.

This book starts from the premise that we might begin to harness a much greater range of biological materials, many of which don’t yet exist, by thinking of materials not as matter to be harvested after the death of the organism which created it but by directing the process of material making while the o...