Architecture, eTrees, & Nature

Abstract

One vision for grafting biological performance into buildings includes inventing, growing, and synthesizing biological attributes for architectural life—thinking of architecture as metabolically evolved nature/culture. This requires a parallel strategy fostering collaborations between design, biology, art, horticulture, e-plant simulation, synthetic life, bio-mineralization, and advanced fabrication. It encourages designers to integrate industrial and agricultural information as design research with the goal of embedding specific environmental-life responses in architecture. This text discusses and illustrates induced evolution in one emerging method for design realized through software simulation—in this case, plant-to-architecture generation based in naturally occurring algorithms, found for example, in botanic phyllotaxy and allometry.