Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ECO-METABOLISTIC-ARC (An Eco-Metabolistic Framework for Sustainable Architecture)
Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2024-10-31
The project ‘An Eco-Metabolistic Framework for Sustainable Architecture’ asks how we can rethink sustainable building practices through a bio-based material paradigm in response to the increasing global crisis of material depletion. Despite well-organised calls for action maturing into legislation and an attentive profession, architecture is proving reticent in this transition. Bio-based materials are fundamentally different to current building materials being characterised by their complex heterogeneity, unpredictable behaviours and limited lifespans. This project identifies that the key impediments to this transition lie with architecture’s inability to represent, conceptualise and operationalise bio-based materials. It argues that to design with bio-based materials we must challenge the fundamental value proposition of architecture and expand our conception of material lifespan to find new practices of construction. It proposes a holistic eco-metabolistic framework, that allows for carbon-neutral, renewable and materially optimised design solutions. It employs a research-by-design method to investigate three bio-based material perspectives (glulam, bio-polymer composites and bioluminescent bacteria) and instrumentalises them through three advanced computational modelling networks for the predictive modelling, adaptive fabrication and environmental sensing of bio-based materials. It challenges our preconception of design agency as restricted to the traditional cut-off point of building completion, proposing new participatory practices of continual construction to recast the short lifespans of bio-based materials as effective properties of a new sustainable practice. By enabling us to think of buildings as co-present and actively engaged through processes of maintenance and intervention, the project responds to the search for sustainable, more socially conscious and more democratic models of production.
The first project period has developed the methodological underpinning of the project and achieved important first results. The project is structured across three material perspectives: ‘The harvested’ examines composite timber track through ideas of functionalising material heterogeneity, ‘The designed’ examines biopolymer composite investigating malleable material through multiple scales of address from material grading, across actions of repair and recycling, and ‘The living’ examines how living organisms can form part of an architectural material palette and how their life spans, behaviours and propagation can be computed within an architectural design framework. These efforts have been supported by cross project sandbox test sites ensuring that results and methods are transferred across the three tracks.
The Harvested
The first research period has resulted in a design driven ideation of the socio-ecological stakeholder networks that the proliferation of timber construction engages and the data chains that they engage. This enabled the building of an interdisciplinary and inter-sector network to interface with CT Scan-to-FEA workflows with a new focus on reclaimed timber streams.
The Designed
The first research period has resulted in the development of heated 3D printheads and their associated robotically steering protocols enabling the extrusion of bio-based and waste sourced materials to create a series of prototypical architecture panels mounted on the sandbox test site. A central part of the computational infrastructures has been to develop a monitoring framework that can track material changes in time.
The Living
In the first research period we have conceptualised the idea of care as central to sympoetic cocreation between species taking place between different sites of experimentation. This has been undertaken creating a design integrated bioreactor for bioluminescent bacteria as test site for an emerging care protocol.
Theory building
EMA's central development is the positioning of the project’s overarching theorem of bio-based materials as essentially transformational, evolving in time and across process, as a critical expansion of the circular design paradigm. This elaboration allows us to extend our conceptualisation of biogenic materials as harvested, designed and living to further dimensions of virgin sourced, waste stream or reclaimed.
The Harvested
The first research period has resulted in a design driven ideation of the socio-ecological stakeholder networks that the proliferation of timber construction engages and the data chains that they engage. This enabled the building of an interdisciplinary and inter-sector network to interface with CT Scan-to-FEA workflows with a new focus on reclaimed timber streams.
The Designed
The first research period has resulted in the development of heated 3D printheads and their associated robotically steering protocols enabling the extrusion of bio-based and waste sourced materials to create a series of prototypical architecture panels mounted on the sandbox test site. A central part of the computational infrastructures has been to develop a monitoring framework that can track material changes in time.
The Living
In the first research period we have conceptualised the idea of care as central to sympoetic cocreation between species taking place between different sites of experimentation. This has been undertaken creating a design integrated bioreactor for bioluminescent bacteria as test site for an emerging care protocol.
Theory building
EMA's central development is the positioning of the project’s overarching theorem of bio-based materials as essentially transformational, evolving in time and across process, as a critical expansion of the circular design paradigm. This elaboration allows us to extend our conceptualisation of biogenic materials as harvested, designed and living to further dimensions of virgin sourced, waste stream or reclaimed.
The project has multiple results that challenge the existing state of the art and provide new ground for architectural thinking. These results couple the efforts of the theoretical framework with the instrumentality of the three material perspectives. The most central contribution in the Eco-Metabolistic Architecture project which significantly advances the field beyond the state of the art is the conference paper “Biopolymer Composites in Circular Designand the research exhibition Radibent. The two-part result establishes 3D extruded biopolymer composites for architecture across multiple cascades foregrounding the malleability of the material absorbing waste sourced materials while presenting novel ways of designing for adaptability, receptibility for repair and recyclability. These results witness the emergence of a new understanding of architectural materiality as essentially motile; a state changing body that is affected by time, use and environmental impact. The results showcased in these projects very directly embody this new materiality and positioning them within an extended understanding of endurance, circularity and life span new key terms within a post Anthropocene architecture.
The wider scope of the project is the theorising of this emerging material understanding and its positioning within a broader context of architectural design as well as the more instrumentalised circular design framework. This result is pre-figured in the international symposium Broken World Building - Future prospects for a Fragile Architecture which is constructed as a precursor to the Ardeth journal special issue (call to be released July 2024).
The emerging framework has the power to create novel design concepts that can link architectural creation to more cyclic understanding of resource procurement, fabrication, occupancy, maintenance and repair allowing true departure from linear models of production in which material readdress (repair) is understood as a mitigation of failure.
Further levels of technical achievement and contribution also have significantly challenged the state of the art. Our work on non-destructive testing of reclaimed timber is important stepping stone in exiting the automatic down grading of reclaimed material streams and instead develop methods that can truly qualify the material. Our work on 3d automated monitoring are likewise important methodological stepping stones for working with malleable.
The wider scope of the project is the theorising of this emerging material understanding and its positioning within a broader context of architectural design as well as the more instrumentalised circular design framework. This result is pre-figured in the international symposium Broken World Building - Future prospects for a Fragile Architecture which is constructed as a precursor to the Ardeth journal special issue (call to be released July 2024).
The emerging framework has the power to create novel design concepts that can link architectural creation to more cyclic understanding of resource procurement, fabrication, occupancy, maintenance and repair allowing true departure from linear models of production in which material readdress (repair) is understood as a mitigation of failure.
Further levels of technical achievement and contribution also have significantly challenged the state of the art. Our work on non-destructive testing of reclaimed timber is important stepping stone in exiting the automatic down grading of reclaimed material streams and instead develop methods that can truly qualify the material. Our work on 3d automated monitoring are likewise important methodological stepping stones for working with malleable.