Systems in Communication with Their Environment

With the aim of finding solutions to the climate catastrophe to which architecture is a major contributor, we have devised an alternative architectural model designed to question current methods and reflect on different approaches. To this end, we conceptualised a model for the design and operation of architecture, in which its behaviour would be the result of its interaction with its natural environment (which is generally the case in ecosystems, unlike built architecture). We have thus imagined an architecture in perpetual transformation, built by progressive iterations in a completely unpredictable and indeterminate way, with the aim of introducing the discipline into a logic of self-organisation and symbiosis with all the species that surround it. Our work is therefore a fundamental research that represents an original and deliberately provocative approach to architectural design, rather than a new building technology. To formalise this idea, we developed a multi-day experiment in which a natural ecosystem is reproduced using living, proliferating bacteria, in which a micro-architecture is 3D printed by iterations according to the evolution of this environment. This installation enabled us to simulate, on a reduced scale, what form the principles of such an architecture would take. We then used the tools we had developed and the patterns we had identified in our bio-robotic device to deduce logics and learning points, as well as to consider a jump in scale in which we reproduced these on an urban scale.