Towards a living architecture

Abstract

Interaction is the latest currency in architecture, as responsive components are now reacting to the inhabitant of the space. These components are designed and installed by the architect with a view to the phenomenology of space, where the experience of the environment is previewed and pre-constructed before it is translated into the conception of the space. However, this traditional approach to new technology leaves no scope for the architecture to be alive in and of itself, and thus the installed piece quickly becomes just that-an installation: isolated and uncontained by its environment. In this paper, we argue that a way to approach a responsive architecture is to design for a piece that is truly living, and in order to propose a living architecture fi rst we need to understand what the architecture of a living system is. This paper suggests a conceptual framework based on the theory of Autopoiesis in order to create a "self-producing" system through an experiment entitled, "The Life of a Wall" (Maturana and Varela 1980). The wall has a responsive membrane controlled by a genetic algorithm that reconfi gures its behaviour and learns to adapt itself continually to the evolutionary properties of the environment, thus becoming a situated, living piece.