Synthetic Natures

In the Anthropocene the distinction between what is natural and what is human-made, which has informed the distinction between the ‘wild’ and the cultured for centuries, has become blurred. So, what is natural and what is artificial in the Anthropocene? The human struggle to contain systems running out of control, species going extinct, and catastrophic effects impacting our safety, has thrown our idea of ‘home’ into a fundamental crisis. According to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) report, 8 million people die every year globally because of air pollution alone. However, we also find strange beauty in the Anthropocene, where unexpected side effects and alternate symbiotic relationships in nature occur. Synthetic natures, a term used here to look at the purposeful symbiotic merging of nature’s intelligence with building structures, studies how these new life forms (species) can alter buildings and material ecologies, and drastically reduce the buildings’ environmental impact, altogether re-defining architecture as being an instrumental part of the solution rather than solely creating the problem. Architecture needs to learn/adapt and hybridize. Rather than simply applying vegetation on otherwise inert structures, buildings themselves need to learn from nature’s intelligence, by adopting plant intelligence, hybridizating and initiating symbiotic relationships with natural systems. In the near future we can ‘grow’ new construction materials with ever more intelligent behaviors. These buildings will generate oxygen, absorb carbon, and are self-healing, creating continuous biomorphic surfaces. In the future city where building structures grow and lower the carbon footprint rather than adding to it, the human race might have a chance of not only surviving, but symbiotically living with these synthetic natures as ‘home’.