Necrosis/Apoptosis

When we think of change in cities, we think usually of growth, of expansion, of gleaming new buildings that make our world a better place. We almost always focus on the new, while forgetting about what happens to the old. When parts of a city are changed, old structures are torn down to make room for better ones. What happens during this deconstruction is just as important as what happens in reconstruction. Like us, a city is a complex organism, and when a piece of a living creature is disposed of, there are consequences.
Building demolition is exactly like the death of cells in the body. In most living creatures, cells can die in two ways: apoptosis or necrosis. The first is what is known as programmed cell death. This means that the destruction of the cell is intentional and deliberately triggered by chemicals in the body. Apoptosis happens when a defect is detected in the genetic makeup of physical structure of the cell and it is killed off to prevent its "bad" genes from being passed on through mitosis. Apoptosis also involves the release of chemicals that tell neighboring cells to absorb the apoptotic bodies. It is very clean, like any good killer.
The other form is necrosis, and this is a bit nastier. For our more squeamish readers, I've done you the favor of not including a picture, but I suggest you Google it, then find a trash can. Necrosis is different from apoptosis because it is cell death triggered by an outside force, like a brown recluse bite. The dying cells do not send signals to neighboring cells, so they are not absorbed. Instead, they sit around and decay. And who loves decaying flesh? Bacteria, which as you know, is generally not good. Even the smallest area of necrosis can spread disease throughout the body, often leading to amputation or death. Even the smallest events of necrosis are massive disruptions.
Cities function in exactly the same ways. Like I've said over and over, cities are living organisms. Buildings are cells, streets are arteries, plumbing is the digestive tract, etc. (I could go on for days with these analogies). And just like our cells, buildings have to die, and it's the reason for their destruction and its aftermath that I bring up apoptosis and necrosis.
Again, we'll start with apoptosis (programmed cell death). In most cases, when a building is destroyed, it is done intentionally. This is often because there is something wrong with the building, but in most cases it is done purely for the sake of new construction. This process can either be a quick implosion or a slow dismantling, but both are carefully coordinated in the same way a body would plan a cell's destruction. Materials are then sold and used in other buildings, just as surrounding cells absorb a dead cell's nutrients. In this way, both buildings and cells that carry out apoptosis are actually beneficial to the organism around them. Below is an example of a building going through apoptosis.

This brings us again to necrosis (non-programmed cell death). In cities this happens when a building is destroyed by a natural disaster, fire, or events like terrorist attacks. Necrosis happens unexpectedly, which guarantees chaos and tragedy. They hurt both individual people and the city as a whole. Take the horrifying events of 9/11. A malicious outside force struck two of New York's "cells", but the destruction did not stop at just the Towers themselves. The effects of the Trade Center's necrosis spread, causing the tragic deaths of thousands of innocent people, the panic of a city, and damage to the surrounding area as well.
It is therefore one of architecture's and evolution's main goals to make it so destruction only occurs under safe and controlled circumstances, because often the fate of an entire city rests on the fate of one building. It is an architect's job to make sure that destruction leads to growth rather than death. 

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.

Living Bridges

Ask an engineer how to build a bridge and he'll give you a month-long lesson in physics. Ask an architect and he'll bore you to tears with theories about movement and efficiency. Ask someone from Cherrapunji, and when he's able to contain his laughter, he'll point to a tree.
In this particular set of villages in northeastern India, they've found a way to substitute concrete pylons and steel cables for tree roots. Last year, Cherrapunji received the highest annual rainfall ever recorded. It's situated high in the mountains, where monsoon clouds break over the peaks and dump more than 1000 inches of rain ever year on the villagers. And with such enormous amounts of precipitation, the rivers on the mountain are nothing but violent rapids and deep arteries that make travel up, down, or across them impossible.

But the villagers have been thriving here for thousands of years, hunting the local wildlife for miles around. Centuries before the first stone bridges of Europe were even conceived, the Indians were already building their own. But without any typical building materials, they turned to the trees. More specifically, the Ficus elastica. This tree, native to the mountains, has a particular talent for growing roots. It has normal underground root structures, but it also produces a massive secondary root system above the ground, with complex roots rising up to half-way up its trunk. These upper roots provide further stability for the tree in the torrential downpours common to the region.
Using only these unique root structures, the villagers have over the years constructed a vastly complex system of bridges. But even building one bridge takes multiple generations of work. As anyone knows, trees don't shoot up overnight. They take hundreds if not more years of slow growth. But this is not a disadvantage to the villagers. Rather, it's provided them ample time to make the bridges perfect, safe, and frankly beautiful.
They "grow" these bridges in a very clever way. The roots need a lot of careful guidance to be turned into usable bridges, and the villagers have come up with a solution. They strip the bark off of a betel nut tree trunk, which resembles an aspen. The bark stays intact in a long, hollow tube, which the roots grow through, allowing the villagers to guide them whichever way they need. Larger roots, over time, grow all the way to the other side of the river, where they take root and give the bridge support. And unlike modern bridges, as these living bridges age, they actually strengthen over time. Smaller roots are wrapped around the larger ones to provide flooring, handrails, and further suspension support. The bridges give the villagers safe access to huge areas of the forest, where they are now able to easily hunt.
Now, the reason I write about this is not to suggest its use in more modern bridges. It's just to show how architecture and infrastructure does not always have to be built. Sometimes, it can be grown, and I feel that that is exactly the direction we are heading.

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One Fish, Two Fish, Flying Buttress, Blue Fish (Part I)

Om nom nom

When most people think of fish, they think of dinner. When architects think of fish they think of one of nature's most beautiful gifts to mankind. The slippery little animals have given them more ideas about form, structure, and movement than any other animal on earth. True, few architects intend for their work to actually look like a fish (unless you're Frank Gehry, but we'll get to him), but many of its basic tendencies can be found in almost all modern architecture.

Let's take a better look at our new best friends. The influence of fish on architecture can be broken into two categories: form and structure. Like any good building, a fish's outside provides beauty, protection, and movement, and it's internal structure gives it strength and efficiency.

Hey, sexy

This is a cod. While it makes for a delicious taco, we will concern ourselves more with it's outside. The cod is a good example of a basic fish shape. Like most fish, it's longer than it is tall and taller than it is wide, has a generally symmetrical shape that curves inward at first, then gradually back out to form the tail. You'll find a similar shape everywhere from leaves to airfoils. Its gentle but defined curves are pleasing to look and allows it to slip easily through the water. These basic principles are applied directly to some of the most beautiful and ingenious modern buildings. 

The obvious place to start is Gehry's fish. The fact that one of the most influential architects of the late 20th and early 21st century lends some weight to the importance of the fish. Its shape can be seen in much of his work, from furniture to concert halls. This, however, is his most famous fish. It sits atop a building in Barcelona and is perhaps the most iconic example of the shape's simple but powerful beauty. Gehry also uses the idea of scales in many of his buildings, another point for the fish.

But Gehry is not the first to obsess over our underwater muse, and he will certainly not be the last. The list of all the world's fish buildings could go on for days, so we'll focus on a few exceptional examples. While they are a lot less literal than the one above, their fishiness should be apparent if you keep the basic shape in mind.

This one happens to be a fish market

Zaha Hadid's Plan for the Performing Arts Center in Abu Dhabi. Am I the only one who thinks beached whale?

Here is one from my sketchbook.

You must surely be craving this by now

Stay tuned for part II, in which we'll talk about the inside of the fish and how it has shaped the inside of buildings

Urban Farming (AKA Dog Vomit Part II)

Daniel Libeskind's new tower

Earlier I talked about a little green ooze called Slime Mold. While they are not nature's prettiest creature, they do give us some good ideas on how our own cities could function. One of their most amazing characteristics is that certain species have discovered farming. Certain cells become "workers", who tend to bacterial orchards right on top of the mold. In this way, the mold is entirely self sufficient and vastly more efficient than any human society.

The trick is, as is often the case, location. Unlike our cities, the farms are built right into the basic structure of the society. Whereas we have to use valuable resources to maintain and connect massive farms miles from urban areas, the mold keeps them millimeters away. But how would we do this in our modern civilization without completely redesigning the very cities themselves?

Well, let's use Manhattan as our test subject, as it is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Try this: go to the planning office and tell them you want to build a farm. They will giggle profusely and have you carried out. No, with modern techniques, farming in Manhattan seems impossible. Even newly popular rooftop gardens could never sustain a population of that size. 

That's why we need to move. In the future, urban farming will be anything but horizontal, and we need great architecture to facilitate it.

One big idea is to build enormous, city block engulfing, farming superstructures. Like open-air skyscrapers, each floor could specialize in a different crop. Irrigation would be easy, relying on existing water infrastructure. Sunlight would be gathered by building the farms in a stair-step structure, like the picture on the right. Farms like these would be a simple and beautiful solution to food demand (and also air quality), but cost would get in the way. Even conventional skyscrapers are enormously expensive to build, especially in times like these.

Another solution is vertical gardening. Blasphemy! Plants can't grow sideways! Yes they can. A relatively inexpensive mesh can cover the sides of buildings which allow soil and irrigation systems to be suspended. Plants then use natural sunlight to give the building a nice green paint-job. The advantage here is that these vertical gardens can be used on existing buildings, eliminating the need for new construction. And as a plus, it's beautiful. Imagine walking through Manhattan surrounded by buildings like these and actually being able to breath. 

Soon you'll be able to reach out the window of your studio apartment and grab breakfast. If we ever want to make self-sustaining cities a reality, vertical is the way to go. 

Drifting

This is the Drift Deck, a project by Near Future Laboratory. It works by guiding its user seemingly randomly through the city. The Deck gives random instructions on how to better interact and appreciate urban environments. For example, you might be prompted to enter new and seemingly mundane places and better appreciate their beauty.

One card reads, "An Alley: Explore. Linger. Document what you find. If there's anything truly curious, photograph it and call it treasure." It's small actions like these that allow Drift Deck to transform the mundane into the extraordinary.

This is the Drift Deck, a project by Near Future Laboratory. It works by guiding its user seemingly randomly through the city. The Deck gives random instructions on how to better interact and appreciate urban environments. For example, you might be prompted to enter new and seemingly mundane places and better appreciate their beauty.

One card reads, "An Alley: Explore. Linger. Document what you find. If there's anything truly curious, photograph it and call it treasure." It's small actions like these that allow Drift Deck to transform the mundane into the extraordinary.