A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Invincible Cities for the Materiomic Age
Making novel buildings from novel materials equals a reenginering of the medium of architecture itself – a design optimisation of an entire creative field. The resulting schemes have less to do with high modernism than with synthetic biology.
The built environment is facing unprecedented opportunities brought about by recent scientific advances that open the laboratory doors to a future of material experimentation. In this chapter, the authors argue that humanity is on its way out of the Concrete Age, perhaps even out of the subsequent Timber Age, and moving rapidly towards the Materiomic Age.
The emergent field of materiomics is defined as the holistic study of material systems. Using this paradigm as a starting point, three speculative cities are presented, based on an architectural reading of Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Le città invisibili.
Positioned within a post-sustainable and post-hylomorphic model, the cities diverge completely in structural, programmatic, and architectural terms, and yet share a unique energy expressed through the audacious material attitude in which they have been steeped.
Advances within consilient fields such as synthetic biology, molecular chemistry, and bioengineering allow these conjectural urban prototypes to function as reconsiderations of the notion of materiality in architecture and urbanism. Positioned as Deleuzian “actualisations of the virtual,” the Invincible Cities presented here push to a new level the idea that the city is mankind’s greatest invention, through the simple guiding principle of material intelligence.
Invincible Cities for the Materiomic Age
Making novel buildings from novel materials equals a reenginering of the medium of architecture itself – a design optimisation of an entire creative field. The resulting schemes have less to do with high modernism than with synthetic biology.
The built environment is facing unprecedented opportunities brought about by recent scientific advances that open the laboratory doors to a future of material experimentation. In this chapter, the authors argue that humanity is on its way out of the Concrete Age, perhaps even out of the subsequent Timber Age, and moving rapidly towards the Materiomic Age.
The emergent field of materiomics is defined as the holistic study of material systems. Using this paradigm as a starting point, three speculative cities are presented, based on an architectural reading of Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Le città invisibili.
Positioned within a post-sustainable and post-hylomorphic model, the cities diverge completely in structural, programmatic, and architectural terms, and yet share a unique energy expressed through the audacious material attitude in which they have been steeped.
Advances within consilient fields such as synthetic biology, molecular chemistry, and bioengineering allow these conjectural urban prototypes to function as reconsiderations of the notion of materiality in architecture and urbanism. Positioned as Deleuzian “actualisations of the virtual,” the Invincible Cities presented here push to a new level the idea that the city is mankind’s greatest invention, through the simple guiding principle of material intelligence.
Invincible Cities for the Materiomic Age
Energy Systems
Rassia, Stamatina Th. (editor) / Pardalos, Panos M. (editor) / Larsson, Magnus (author) / Kaiser, Alex (author)
2013-07-03
45 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
The glazed roofing "invincible"
| Engineering Index Backfile | 1912
I saw a city invincible : urban portraits of Latin America
| TIBKAT | 1996