Movement

It's official. Plants can think. 

"I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you over how ridiculous that previous statement was," you may say. But it's true. Personally, I'm not surprised. I've always had the funny feeling my Boston Fern is conspiring against me. But what's really shocking is howthey think. Previously, we'd all thought that plants were just passive, automatic organisms, as opposed to active organisms like ourselves. Recently, however, advancements in microbiology have revealed that they rely on a massively complex sensory system to control photosynthesis, growth, and movement, all controlled by brain-like command centers located in the root tips.

And this isn't a new discovery. The father of modern biology, Charles Darwin hypothesized exactly what modern scientists have just confirmed. In his book, The Power of Movement of Plants, he wrote, “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed [with sensitivity] and having the power of directing the movements of the adjoining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements." In fact, Darwin spent almost half of his career on this revelation. 

So what exactly are these movements? We've been taught that Venus Fly traps are the only moving plants, but as usual, we've been taught wrong. Plants are in constant motion every second of the day. The problem is, you can't see it. Time lapse footage like the video below reveals that plants indeed move, just on a much different time scale than ours.

So what controls these movements? Well, it turns out that as plants grow, regions in the root apexes, the most active area of cell division, construct an actin cytoskeleton, AKA a nervous system. To make a long and very technical story even more mind-boggling, read this article because it's far to complicated for me to even try to explain here.

                        Woah, man. Slow down.

(I hate to do this, but it's time for an Avatar allusion to put all this in perspective. If you've seen the movie, you'll recall that all of the vegetation on Pandora seemed to be in constant, conscious contact with the world around it. Well, as it turns out, that may be just the case on Earth.)

But, though it's a spectacular discovery, what does any of this have to do with architecture? As usual, I'm getting there. See, just like plants, we've always assumed buildings to be these quiet, sleeping structures with no movement or conscious thought. But if architecture is art (it is) and art mimics nature (it does) then architecture should mimic nature (it should). But now that the plant, a building's closest natural relative is found to have been moving all along, shouldn't architecture be moving too? 

It makes sense. Plants move so that they can maximize as much leaf surface area as possible, and they do this through an intelligent nervous system while making all the energy they ever need in-house. So, if architecture is doing it's job, it should do the exact same.

And now, it does. Or at least in a few years it will. There is a massive new architectural movement brewing, known as Dynamic Architecture. It aims to solve some of city life's biggest problems through motion. The idea is to have a tower in which each floor or group of floors can turn 360 degrees independently. This would allow each tenant full panoramic views, but that's just the fluffy stuff. 

As the melodramatic music of that video told you, this is a big deal. Just like in plants, the movement is not intended to give inhabitants some nice scenery, but to sustain itself. Such massive movement is powered not by the grid, but by the building itself. Horizontal wind turbines are fitted in between each in between each floor, so that air passing through the building is used to power it. Enough power could be generated by one building to provide clean energy for a whole urban area. And supposedly, the buildings would be built in a "smart envelope" design to maximize the higher amount of sunlight each room gets now that they face the sun more of the day. Buildings like this could literally revolutionize urban living.

                       "Jeeves, I'd like to face East tonight."

Physicists and biologists like to talk about the fourth dimension, which is time. Animals, grow, move, change their shape over time. Architects have always been limited to the third dimension, because their creations have never been able to move. Until now.