and that means that there is a one way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities this is not sustainable
i believe that the only way that it is possible for us to constructgenuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature not insulating them from it
now in order to do this we need the right kind of language living systems are in constant conversation with the natural world through sets of chemical reactions called metabolism
and this is the conversion of one group of substances into another either through the production or the absorption of energy
and this is the way in which living materials make the most of their local resources in a sustainable way
so i'm interested in the use of metabolic materials for the practice of architecture but they don't exist so i'm having to make them i'm working with architect neil spiller at the bartlett school of architecture
and we're collaborating with international scientists in order to generate these new materials from a bottom up approach that means we're generating them from scratch
one of our collaborators is chemist martin hanczyc and he 's really interested in the transition from inert to living matter
now that's exactly the kind of process that i'm interested in when we're thinking about sustainable materials so martin he works with a system called the
all this is and it's magic is a little fatty bag and it's got a chemicalbattery in it and it has no dna
this little bag is able to conduct itself in a way that can only be described as living it is able to move around its environment
it can follow chemical gradients it can undergocomplex reactions some of which are happily architectural
so here we are these are protocells patterning their environment we don't know how they do that yet
here this is a protocell and it's vigorously shedding this skin now this looks like a chemical kind of birth this is a violent process
here we've got a protocell to extractcarbondioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into carbonate and that's the shell around that globular fat they are quite brittle so you've only got a part of one
so what we're trying to do is we're trying to push these technologies towards creating bottom up construction approaches for architecture which contrast
the current victorian top down methods which imposestructure upon matter that can't be energetically sensible
so bottom up materials actually exist today they've been in use in architecture since ancient times
if you walk around the city of oxford where we are today and have a look at the brickwork which i've enjoyed doing in the last couple of days you'll actually see that a lot of it is made of limestone and if you look even closer
but imagine what the properties of this limestone block might be if the surfaces were actually in conversation with the atmosphere maybe they could extractcarbon dioxide
it give this block of limestone new properties well most likely it would it might be able to grow it might be able to self repair and even respond to dramatic changes in the immediate environment
so architects are never happy with just one block of an interesting material they think big okay so when we think about scaling up metabolic materials
we can start thinking about ecological interventions like repair of atolls or reclamation of parts of a city that are damaged by water
so one of these examples would of course be the historic city of venice now venice as you know has a tempestuous relationship with the sea
and is built upon wooden piles so we've devised a way by which it may be possible for the protocell technology that we're working with to sustainably reclaim venice
so here is the technology we have today this is our protocell technology effectively making a shell like its limestone forefathers
and depositing it in a very complexenvironment against natural materials we're looking at crystal lattices to see the bonding process in this
now this is the very interesting part we don't just want limestone dumped everywhere in all the pretty canals what we need it to do is to be creatively crafted around the wooden piles
so you can see from these diagrams that the protocell is actually moving away from the light toward the dark foundations we've observed this in
can actually move away from the light they can actually also move towards the light you have to just choose your species so that these don't just exist as one entity we kind of chemically engineer them
the protocells are depositing their limestone very specifically around the foundations of veniceeffectively petrifying it
now this isn't going to happen tomorrow it's going to take a while it's going to take years of tuning and monitoring this technology
in order for us to become ready to test it out in a case by case basis on the most damaged and stressed buildings within the city of venice but
as the buildings are repaired we will see the accretion of a limestone reef beneath the city an accretion itself is a huge sink of carbon dioxide
to the natural world in a very direct and immediate way but perhaps the most exciting thing about it is that the driver of this technology is available everywhere this is
so in summary i'm generating metabolic materials as a counterpoise to victorian technologies and building architectures from a bottom up approach secondly
and finally an observer in the future marveling at a beautiful structure in the environment may find it almost impossible to tell
this structure has been created by a natural process or an artificial one thank you
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