The Future of Architecture is Between Oxman and Terragni

Abstract

What will be the future of architecture? Architecture is among the major culprits of the CO₂ emissions that cause the current ambiental crisis. The discoveries of coding, digital design and digital fabrication—including topological optimization, reactive skins, and lightweight technologies such as 3D printing of natural and environmentally friendly materials—are essential to finding an alternative path to those used so far. A road that not only addresses the “technical” issues of the climate crisis but is capable of proposing a new vision of the world, a spatial system that is structurally, physiologically and symbolically based on the concept of coexistence, of symbiosis, between the world of man, the house of man, and the rest of the biosphere. The work on biomaterials from the digital fabrication world assumes crucial importance in this perspective. It is the first research capable of demonstrating that the inert envelopes of architecture can become organisms and no longer in a metaphorical key: buildings like trees programmed to become skyscrapers, houses like pods and fibres that transport people by capillarity along with water and nutrients. Energy from domesticated photosynthesis processes, eyelids and hairs that grow to shield excess light. Architecture that reconfigures itself as a living form similar to what already happens in nature for the calcareous secretions that we call shell. Yet before we can indulge ourselves in transforming architecture within these new ways, there are at least two issues that cannot be ignored so as not to repeat the mistakes made by Modernism a hundred years ago.