Materiality and beyond

" The microdomain of the virus is that in which the tobacco-mosaic experiments first showed that the domain of the virus is apparently the threshold between what we have known in the past as the inanimate and the animate. The virus follows all the behavioral rules of inanimate crystal, but also follows all the laws of animate biology. It is both animate and inanimate- in fact as a threshold it overlaps both. It does not divide them. It calls for a totally new concept of what we are physically; it asks just how physical is life and what is unique to the individual? Within the virus we have the famous DNA and RNA, the nucleic acids of four chemical compounds whose interpatterning sequences in helixes control all the patterning and all the designs of life." 

[Fuller_Prevailing Conditions in the Arts]. 

If this is the case, how animated can materials and utterly buildings become? It is already obvious that a building responds as a living organism to it's environments,through heat exchange etc., but how literal can that become? Living tissues embedded in building materials could make buildings grow in time, and utterly die at some point! And regenerate_ That could lead to a new building ecology. Building could just grow following a genetic code of some sort, and then architecture would eventually be bio-architecture, or biotecture, a whole new domain. But before getting to extremities we could anyway have materials "perform" one with another, possibly on-site, through chemical reactions.

Biotecture seems to be old-news though. As a term at least, it has been used some times now to speak of sustainable design, green roofs, breathing facades etc. And it has indeed been used once or twice in the way implied before. The closest example seems to be the project at MIT some years ago, the "Fab Tree House"- a proper home constructed almost entirely from living trees and plants. The "Fab Tree House"uses an ancient technique called pleaching- where branches are woven together to form lattice structures.

Tim McKeough, ("The new Climate Almanac: Grow your own Home") ironically points out that biotecture may seem far-fetched, but the tools to build a tree house already exist. 

But you can never know..