Invincible Cities for the Materiomic Age

Larsson, Magnus; Kaiser, Alex

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-37661-0_4

Magnus Larsson⁴ &
Alex Kaiser⁴

Part of the book series: Energy Systems ((ENERGY))

3315 Accesses
1 Citations

Abstract

Making novel buildings from novel materials equals a reenginering of the medium of architecture itself – a design optimisation of an entire creative field. The resulting schemes have less to do with high modernism than with synthetic biology.

The built environment is facing unprecedented opportunities brought about by recent scientific advances that open the laboratory doors to a future of material experimentation. In this chapter, the authors argue that humanity is on its way out of the Concrete Age, perhaps even out of the subsequent Timber Age, and moving rapidly towards the Materiomic Age.

The emergent field of materiomics is defined as the holistic study of material systems. Using this paradigm as a starting point, three speculative cities are presented, based on an architectural reading of Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Le città invisibili.

Positioned within a post-sustainable and post-hylomorphic model, the cities diverge completely in structural, programmatic, and architectural terms, and yet share a unique energy expressed through the audacious material attitude in which they have been steeped.

Advances within consilient fields such as synthetic biology, molecular chemistry, and bioengineering allow these conjectural urban prototypes to function as reconsiderations of the notion of materiality in architecture and urbanism. Positioned as Deleuzian “actualisations of the virtual,” the Invincible Cities presented here push to a new level the idea that the city is mankind’s greatest invention, through the simple guiding principle of material intelligence.

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Notes

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Carl Sagan, “Cosmos”. New York: Random House. 1980, p. 218.
2.
A passage later turned into Hollywood folklore as part of Woody Harrelson’s lecture in a 1993 blockbuster movie: Adrian Lyne, Indecent Proposal (Paramount, 1993).
3.
Richard Saul Wurman, What Will Be Has Always Been: The Words of Louis I. Kahn (New York: Access Press & Rizzoli, 1986), p. 152. Kahn often repeated these statements, and they can be found in various sources. A recorded version of the architect delivering a similar passage to a meeting of students is available online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CYRSg-cjs4. The quote is slightly different: If you think of brick, for instance, you say to brick, What do you want Brick? And brick says to you, I like an arch. And if you say to brick, Look Brick, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over you. What do you think of that, Brick? Brick says, I like an arch.
4.
Stoljar, Daniel, “Physicalism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/physicalism/
5.
Peter Salter, TS Intuition and Process: Projects under the tutelage of Peter Salter (London: Architectural Association, 1989), p. 48.
6.
Cf. Mohammad Mehdi Masoumi & Soheila Naderinezhad, Elevator was Worked by Water and Water Pump. Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology 4(24):5557–5560, 2012), p. 5557. For a dramatic account of Otis’s first demonstration of his invention at the New York’s World Fair in May 1854, and a discussion on the elevator’s role in the evolution of the skyscraper, see Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), pp. 25–27 (originally published in 1978).
7.
The history of the microscope can be traced from the Jansens and possibly their contemporary, Hans Lippershey, via Galileo Galilei (who made a much better instrument in 1624), Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Hooke, and Charles A. Spencer, through to today’s rise of fluorescence microscopy in biology. Cf. John Gribbin, Science: A History 1543–2001 (London: Penguin, 2003) and Reginald S. Clay & Thomas H. Court, History of the Microscope (London: Chas Griffin & Co, 1932).
8.
Composed of a single proton paired with a single electron, hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant chemical element in the universe. By mass, however, iron is the most abundant element making up the Earth, while oxygen is the most common element in our planet’s crust. Hydrogen makes up 75 % of normal matter (by mass) and more than 90 % by number of atoms. However, most of the mass of the universe is not in the form of chemical-element-type matter, but is postulated to occur as other forms of mass such as dark matter.
9.
The first pottery appeared around 29000BC. The oldest discovered bricks, originally made from shaped mud, dates to before 7500 BC. The history of concrete goes back some 7,000 years. Copper metallurgy was invented in the third millennium BC; bronze in the second millennium BC. Crude iron metallurgy was developed by the Hittites in the sixteenth century BC. The invention of steel is from the thirteenth century BC. Glass production began in ancient Near East in the tenth century BC. Porcelain was invented in Tang Dynasty China in the eighth century AD. Portland cement was invented by Joseph Aspdin in 1824, the first man-made plastic was created by Alexander Parkes and publicly demonstrated at the 1862 Great International Exhibition in London, stainless steel was invented by Harry Brearley in 1912, and nylon by Wallace Carothers in 1931.
10.
Cf. Clive Ferguson, Historical Introduction to the Development of Material Science and Engineering as a Teaching Discipline (UK Centre for Materials Education). Available online: http://www.materials.ac.uk/pub/Materials-History-Intro.pdf
11.
The invention was made in 1931; Ruska won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986.
12.
Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz is another notable example: for his St Peter’s Church at Klippan in Sweden, he refused to cut the standard bricks, Instead, he allowed the mortar joints to expand and contract freely. A rather active way of remaining passive with regards to the engineering of the brick. For a discussion, see Adam Caruso, Sigurd Lewerentz and a Material Basis for Form, OASE (Amsterdam, Netherlands: 1997) Issue 45/46, pp. 88–95. Available online: http://www.carusostjohn.com/text/sigurd-leverentz-and-a-material-basis-for-form/
13.
Kengo Kuma, The Relativity of Materials, JA The Japan Architect 38/Summer 2000, reprinted in Luigi Alini, Kengo Kuma – Works and Projects (Milan: Electa Architecture, 2005), pp. 222–223.
14.
Robert Bruegmann, The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago, 1880–1910. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0-226-07695-9), p. 472.
15.
Fire was a major problem with the nineteenth-century timber framed mills – the example refers to the erection in 1792–1793 of a six-story cotton mill at Derby, designed by engineer William Strutt together with Richard Arkwright (inventor of the spinning jenny). Cf. James W. McAllister, Beauty & Revolution in Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 143.
16.
Frank Lloyd Wright, The Tyranny of the Skyscraper in Frank Lloyd Wright, Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931) p. 85.
17.
Reese Palley, Concrete: A Seven-Thousand-Year History (New York: Quantuck Lane Press, 2010).
18.
Roman concrete, opus caementicium, was made from quicklime, pozzolana, and an aggregate of pumice. Its widespread use freed Roman construction from the restrictions of stone and brick material, and allowed for the revolutionary new designs that heralded the arched, vaulted, and domed structures of the Roman Architectural Revolution (also known as the Concrete Revolution).
19.
Bernard Forêst de Bélidor, L’architecture hydraulique, ou l’art de conduire, d’élever et de ménager les eaux pour les différents besoins de la vie (Paris: Chez Firmin Didot, 1819; first published 1737–1753).
20.
World Business Council for Sustainable Development, The Cement Sustainability Initiative (Geneva/Washington: WBCSD, 2007). Available online: http://www.kankyo.metro.tokyo.jp/resource/attachement/Cement\%20Sustainability\%20Initiative.pdf
21.
Author correspondence with USGS Commodity Specialist for cement Hendrik G Van Oss, 1 August 2011.
22.
Kengo Kuma, A Return to Materials, in Luigi Alini, ibid., p. 15.
23.
Ibid., pp. 16–18.
24.
World Business Council for Sustainable Development, ibid.
25.
U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries, January 2012. Available online: http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/mcs/
26.
Polish geneticist Wacław Szybalski introduced the term “synthetic biology” already in 1974: “Up to now we are working on the descriptive phase of molecular biology. … But the real challenge will start when we enter the synthetic biology phase of research in our field.” Wacław Szybalski, In Vivo and in Vitro Initiation of Transcription, in A. Kohn and A. Shatkay (Eds.), Control of Gene Expression, pp. 23–24, and Discussion pp. 404–405 (Szybalski’s concept of Synthetic Biology), 411–2, 415–7. (New York: Plenum Press, 1974), p. 405.
27.
American-Canadian writer William Gibson is reported to have first said this in an interview on Fresh Air, NPR (31 August 1993). Gibson repeated the quote, prefacing it with the words “As I’ve said many times…,” in The Science in Science Fiction on Talk of the Nation, NPR (30 November 1999, time code 11:55).
28.
S.W. Cranford, M.J. Buehler, Biomateriomics, Springer Series in Materials Science 165, 27 DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-1611-7_2 (Dordrecht: Springer Science + Business Media, 2012), p. 33.
29.
Ibid.
30.
Ibid., p. 22.
31.
Edward O Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).
32.
Ibid., p. 258.
33.
Ibid., p. 12.
34.
Steven Cranford & Markus J Buehler, Materiomics: biological protein materials, from nano to macro, Nanotechnology, Science and Applications 2010:3 127–148, p. 133.
35.
Chris Lefteri, Tangible vs Intangible, article in Innovation (Vol. 30, No. 1, 2011; Library of Congress Catalog No. 82–640971; ISSN No. 0731–2334; USPS 0016–067.), p. 29. Available online: http://idsa.org/images/pdfs/InnSpring2011_Tangible.pdf
36.
Cranford & Buehler, ibid., p. 132.
37.
Roland Barthes, Plastic, in Roland Barthes, Mythologies, transl. Anette Lavers (New York, The Noonday Press, 1991), p. 97.
38.
Andrea Deplazes, The Importance of the Material, in Andrea Deplazes (ed.), Constructing Architecture – Materials Processes Structures – A Handbook (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 2005), p. 19.
39.
Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architeture (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 1998), p. 11.
40.
Peter Zumthor, Therme Vals, (Zurich, Scheidegger & Spies, 2007), p. 136.
41.
Peter Zumthor, Ibid., 1998, p. 34.
42.
Neri Oxman, Oublier Domino – On the Evolution of Architectural Theory from Spatial to Performance-based Programming (conference proceedings, First International Conference on Critical Digital: What Matter(s)? Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 18–19 April 2008), p. 393.
43.
Ibid., p. 394.
44.
Liat Margolis, Encoding – Digital & Analoge Taxonavigation, in Thomas Schröpfer, Material Design – Informing Architecture by Materiality (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, ), p. 152.
45.
The United Nations, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision (United Nations, 2008). Available online: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wup2007/2007WUP_ExecSum_web.pdf
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David Owen, Green Manhattan: Everywhere Should be More like New York (The New Yorker, October 18, 2004), p. 111.
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53.
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54.
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56.
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59.
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61.
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62.
As discussed in John Welsh, Erasing the Invisible Cities: Italo Calvino and the Violence of Representation (Berkely Electronic Press, 2008), p. 5. Available online: http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=wproml
63.
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The quote is from Jeffrey Kipnis, Form’s Second Coming, in Bernard Tschumi & Irene Cheng (eds.), The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2003), p. 59. For more on Leibniz’s monadology, cf. Anthony Savile, Routledge Philosophy guidebook to Leibniz and the Monadology (London: Routledge, 2000).
65.
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69.
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73.
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78.
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81.
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82.
Italo Calvino, ibid., p. 69.
83.
Hani Buri & Yves Weinand, The Tectonics of Timber Architecture in the Digital Age, in Hermann Kaufmann and Winfried Nerdinger, Building with Timber – Paths into the Future (Pretzel, Munich, 2011), pp. 56–63.
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86.
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87.
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91.
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92.
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93.
Italo Calvino, ibid., p. 67.
94.
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96.
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97.
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98.
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99.
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100.
The project is described in detail, with essays by 14 authors, in Jalila Essaïdi (ed.), Bulletproof skin, Exploring Boundaries by Piercing Barriers (ISBN: 978-90-819957-0-2).
101.
Ibid., p. 95.
102.
Martin Humenik, Andrew M. Smith, Thomas Scheibel, Recombinant Spider Silks—Biopolymers with Potential for Future Applications (Polymers 2011, 3, 640–661; doi:10.3390/polym3010640), pp. 645–646.
103.
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104.
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106.
Philip Steadman, The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 1979), p. 261.
107.
Neri Oxman, Printing 3D Buildings: Five tenets of a new kind of architecture, 30-min profile on CNN’s The Next List, 7 December 2012. An excerpt is available online: http://whatsnext.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/07/printing-3d-buildings-five-tenets-of-a-new-kind-of-architecture/
108.
Tomás Saraceno, 14 Billions (Working Title) (Milan: Skira Editore S.p.A., 2011).
109.
Cf. http://www.tomassaraceno.com
110.
Adam Rutherford, Synthetic biology and the rise of the ‘spider-goats’ (interview with professor Randolph Lewis, The Observer, Saturday 14 January 2012). Available online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/14/synthetic-biology-spider-goat-genetics
111.
Russell Watkins in National Geographic, Pictures: Trees Cocooned in Webs After Flood. 7 March 2012. Available online: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/pictures/110331-pakistan-flood-spider-trees-webs/
112.
Daniel Munoz (Reuters) in National Geographic, Spiderwebs Blanket Countryside After Australian Floods (Pictures). Available online: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/pictures/120307-spiderwebs-australia-floods-wagga-wagga-world-science/
113.
Tamsir A, Tabor J J, Voigt C A, Robust multicellular computing using genetically encoded NOR gates and chemical ‘wires’ (Nature 469, 212–215 (13 January 2011) doi:10.1038/nature09565).
114.
Yona Friedman, Mobile Architecture: 10 Principles of Spatial Urbanism (Principles Mobile Architecture, 1959).
115.
Martin Humenik, Andrew M. Smith, Thomas Scheibel, ibid., p. 641.
116.
Conversations between Tomás Saraceno (TS), Marion Ackermann (MA), Daniel Birnbaum (DB), Hans Ulrich Obrist (HUO) and Udo Kittelmann (UK) in Tomás Saraceno. Cloud Cities, DISTANZ Verlag Berlin, 2011, 256 Seiten, deu/eng, etwa 180 Farbabbildungen, ISBN: 978-3-942405-37-9.
117.
The address changed to 2066 when the land was annexed from the county to the city in late 1983. The coordinates are N37°20′, W122°04′.
118.
For an account of the microcomputer revolution, cf. Roy A Allan, A History of the Personal Computer: The People and the Technology (London, Ontario, Canada: Allan Publishing, 2001). Available online: http://books.google.ca/books?id=FLabRYnGrOcC&pg=PA14&dq=history+of+the+microcomputer+revolution&lr=\#v=onepage&q=history\%20of\%20the\%20microcomputer\%20revolution&f=false
119.
Mike Loukides, Biohacking: The next great wave of innovation, O’Reilly Radar (website article, 10 October, 2012). Available online: http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/10/biohacking.html
120.
Ibid.
121.
Corbusier L (1927) Towards a new architecture. Architectural Press, London, p. 10 (French original Vers Une Architecture, 1923).
122.
Kurzweil R (1992) The age of intelligent machines. The MIT Press, Boston.
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Christopher Voigt quoted in Katherine Bourzac, Software for Programming Microbes – A simpler way to modify microbes could help produce biofuels and drugs efficiently (article in MIT Technology Review, January 5, 2011). Available online: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/422283/software-for-programming-microbes/
126.
Tamsir A, Tabor JJ, Voigt CA (2011) Robust multicellular computing using genetically encoded NOR gates and chemical ‘wires’. Nature 469(7329):212–215. doi: 10.1038/nature09565.
127.
A moment described by Umberto Eco in Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture, in Geoffrey Broadbent, Richard Bunt & Charles Jencks (eds.), Signs, Symbols and Architecture (Chichester: John Wiley, 1980), pp. 12–13.
128.
Brent C. Brolin, The Failure of Modern Architecture (London: Studio Vista, 1976), p. 14.
129.
Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia – Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA: Swerve Editinos/The MIT Press, 1992), p. 10.
130.
Ibid. The original quote is “A thing has as many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it”. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (London, Continuum, 2006), p. 4.
131.
Aristotle, Metaphysics (London: Penguin, 1988).
132.
Katie Lloyd Thomas, Introduction: Architecture and Material Practice, in Katie Lloyd Thomas (ed.), Architecture and Material Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 3.
133.
Ibid.
134.
Ibid.
135.
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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Stamatina Th. Rassia for her angelic patience while waiting for this chapter to get finished. Also Jack Munro for his excellent assistance, Thidaa Roberts for unwavering support way beyond any call of duty, and Madelaine Levy for delivering a baby boy while her partner tried his best to return to Earth from a mental space filled with thoughts about post-sustainable urbanism in the Materiomic Age.

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Magnus Larsson & Alex Kaiser

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Magnus Larsson
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Alex Kaiser
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Correspondence to Magnus Larsson .

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Department Architektur, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
Stamatina Th. Rassia
Department of Industrial and Systems Eng, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA
Panos M. Pardalos

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Larsson, M., Kaiser, A. (2014). Invincible Cities for the Materiomic Age. In: Rassia, S., Pardalos, P. (eds) Cities for Smart Environmental and Energy Futures. Energy Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37661-0_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37661-0_4
Published: 03 July 2013
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Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37660-3
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