ordinary ltd

Chair – Top Right – Studio

Chair – Top Right – Theory

Chair – Top Right – Design

Theory – Bin

Theory – Place Holder

Ordinary Playlist: February 2013

Each month, we pick our favourite tunes from the playlist that runs in the background as we toil away in the Ordinary workshop. This then becomes the official soundtrack of our lives for that particular month. Here are the songs that have been rocking our world lately.

 

Hot Chip – Look at Where We Are (from In Our Heads, 2012)
Tessellate – Alt-J (from An Awesome Wave, 2012)
David Shrigley – Don’ts (from Late Night Tales: Four Tet (Remastered), 2012)
Cyclones – See If I Float (from The Music Sounds Better With Huw, 2009)
Photek – KJZ (from Modus Operandi, 1997)
Ben Folds & Rufus Wainwright – Careless Whisper (from The Best Imitation of Myself – A Retrospective, 2011)
General Fiasco – Don’t You Ever (from Don’t You Ever EP, 2012)
LCD Soundsystem – Losing My Edge (from LCD Soundsystem, 2005)
Ben Folds Five – On Being Frank (from The Sound of the Life of the Mind, 2012)
The Killers – Runaways (from Battle Born, 2012)
Artur Rubinstein – Frederic Chopin, Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23 (from Chopin Piano Works, 2011)
Rodriguez – I Wonder (Searching for Sugar Man, 2012)

Lab – Place Holder

Architecture – Place Holder

Work – Place Holder

Bottom Far Right Chair -0B7

Bottom Chair – OB2 – Left – STUDIO & WORK & HOME

Ted Talk – Dune

A single grain of sand is almost nothing: a splinter of rock, a miniscule fragment of a geological formation, the residue of a microcosmic event. Myriad grains together, however, become almost everything: mesmerising landscapes, vast deserts, a fluid material capable of being transformed into not just solid structures but a novel desert architecture.

Dune was presented at TED Global in July 2009. You can see the presentation here: http://www.ted.com/talks/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html

Non click

The New Order: Ionian Landscapes (Kerb Magazine)

For Kerb Magazine #19, we shared our vision of a newfangled role for architecture, and reflected on future bacillithical and crystalline landscapes extending across four different scales, from the incredibly small to the incomprehensibly vast.

 

Man can only do what nature permits him to do. Man does not invent anything. He makes discoveries of principles operative in nature and often finds ways of generalizing those principles and reapplying them in surprise directions. That is called invention. But he does not do anything artificial. Nature has to permit it, and if nature permits it, it is natural. There is naught which is unnatural.1
On 13 January this year, the most venerable science journal in the world, Nature, published an article with the snappy title Robust multicellular computing using genetically encoded NOR gates and chemical ‘wires’. The first sentence reads “Computation underlies the organization of cells into higher-order structures, for example during development or the spatial association of bacteria in a biofilm,” and I dare guess not many Nature-reading architects raised an eyebrow.2
But they should have.
Multicellular computing is about writing software to control the creation of genetic circuits in microbes – “pathways of genes, proteins, and other biomolecules that the cells use to perform a particular task, such as breaking down sugar and turning it into fuel,” to quote an interview with co-author Chistopher Voigt in MIT’s Technology Review.3
Voigt and his colleagues have already managed to create basic circuit components in the bacterium Escherichia coli, and are now “trying to make the cell understand where it is and what it should be doing based on its understanding of the world”. This understanding is aided through giving bacteria the senses of touch, sight, and smell. Euqipped with this, the cells can be programmed on an abstract level like robots and made to perform complex, coordinated tasks.
The implication for architecture is breathtaking. Once the materials we use become biologically programmable, the very nature of the discipline is bound to change irrevocably: while interdisciplinary research has already begun to yield metamaterials (artificial materials engineered to have properties that go beyond those found in nature), the use of computational processes to control cellular compositions essentially gives us the power to precisely configure the built environment, expanding vastly our capacity to use programmable bacteria as building elements.
The most exciting topic within architecture today is biology. This is not surprising: arguably, the most interesting evolution of society today is happening in biology, in particular within the synthetic field of the brilliant professor Voigt, who quickly got snapped up by MIT once his paper was made public. Architecture takes its cues from prevailing scientific and cultural movements, and at the moment, we’re working within a veritable explosion of new biology. This naturally shapes today’s (or at least tomorrow’s) architecture much as the explosion of data and computers shaped architecture throughout the 20th century.
Molecular nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler is one contemporary scientist who probably saw this coming. As early as 1986 he wrote that:
“…now biochemists have gone to work examining the machines that build, repair, and control cells. They have learned to assemble viruses and reprogram bacteria. For the first time in history, people are examining their molecules and unraveling the molecular secrets of life. It seems that molecular engineers will eventually combine improved biochemical knowledge with improved molecular machines, learning to repair damaged tissue structures and so rejuvenate them.”4
25 years later, science has almost caught up with Drexler’s thinking. Voigt’s progress is a major step forward in the process of giving genetically modified microbes a job, but as American inventor, entrepreneur, author, and Drexler supporter Ray Kurzweil has pointed out, utilising full-scale nanoengineering to construct macroscale objects at the molecular scale is “still considered a middle to late 2020s technology”.5
Another of Kurzweil’s observations is that long-term trends are interesting because “an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started”.6 Extrapolated to the field of architecture in the age of synthetic biology, this could be taken as a call to action: maybe it is time to start designing for materials and processes that don’t even exist.
Materials and processes that don’t exist yet, that is. The new generation of synthetic biologists fronted by leading lights such as Voigt is clearly going beyond the examination of molecular secrets described by Drexler. Soon they will be able to control the biological machines that control cells, and when that happens, a whole new realm of architecture opens up, based on “the design rules by which simple logic can be harnessed to produce diverse and complex calculations by rewiring communication between cells”.7 To extend the machine metaphor, Le Corbusier enjoyed talking about the house as a machine for living in.7 Ray Kurzweil named one of his books The Age of Intelligent Machines,8 while leading theorist, author, and founding editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, pronounced the future of machines to be biology.9
If Voigt’s programmable genetic circuit is the latest addition to that trajectory and we learn to create novel materials from computer-controlled synthetic ecosystems, then architects might soon be designing intelligent biological machines for living in. An architect’s technical drawing could contain new sets of instructions: instead of material specifications, perhaps timings for the release of quorum molecules within the bacterially controlled material volume; instead of dimensions, spatial configurations of the bacterial colonies; instead of surface treatments, programmed instructions detailing the precise mapping of where microbe robots will release, emit, repair, cover, coat, glaze, deposit, decompose, etch, polish, grind…
What would the next evolutionary step be? Perhaps architectural machines built from a new sub class of reconfigurable, computational biomaterials that are able to fundamentally change their properties and characteristics beyond traditional notions of self-assembly, in accordance with chemical signal inputs received from a human designer. A spectacular design strategy falling somewhere between in silico and in vivo, sculpting with code in real time on a microbial scale. Such machines, moreover, would double as living, reprogrammable memory storage units. Their performative properties could be programmed to change with incoming data; they could save and play back previous configuration patterns for control purposes; they could even host “internal debates” within their own material structures to inform responses to incoming parameters: Voigt’s NOR gates can be combined to perform any logical operation, and some of his bacterial circuits hack into existing bacterial communication systems called quorum sensing, based on the local density of their population, allowing the cells to increase the quality of the computations performed by “voting” on an output.10
At its most fundamental, architecture is about densifications of matter. The design of our built environment is an accretive process of aggregation and erosion, extending across different scales: cellular accumulations become material articulations that become spatial environments that become built artefacts that become manipulated landscapes that in their most intense states become that greatest of all human inventions: cities.
The construction of completely new organisms lays the groundwork for the construction of completely new materials, and the construction of completely new materials suggests the possibility of new architectures, which can in turn provide a basis for the creation of new kinds of urban realities, alternative and innovative cities, perfect acts of landscape architecture. As biology goes from being a descriptive science to being an engineering science, architecture has the rare chance to go beyond metaphor: instead of Mies van der Rohe’s “exoskeletal” steel frames at the IIT campus in Chicago, Illinois, we can design novel architectural experiences using materials that are programmed to actually be exoskeletal; instead of biomorphic references to living forms, we can design the living forms themselves.
Biotechnology engineers and scientists from MIT, Harvard, and UCSF have created an archive of standardised interchangeable biological parts called BioBricks, sequences of DNA that can perform particular functions, a toolbox filled with biological materials that work as molecules inside living organisms and can be used to engineer biological systems.11 By analogy, today’s ubiquitous use of scripted geometries in architecture, automated modelling through conditional and iterative command executions, could extend to biomaterial manipulations at the material scale, literally injecting new life into coded actions such as arraying, offsetting, trimming, and exploding our designs. Ultimately, the skill of the programmer sets the limits for what is possible within such a system: Voigt has already programmed a strain of Salmonella to make and spin its own spider silk, a substance as strong as, but ten times more elastic than, kevlar.12
So where does this leave the architect? Is she to become a combined designer, synthetic biologist, material scientist, biological engineer, and bio-programmer? Or simply a more consilient architect, capable of directing people from disciplines that have traditionally not been associated with architecture (or which didn’t even exist before)? Will architects reclaim the role of conceptual originator with a license to initiate design investigations beyond the tried and tested? Will we work in close collaboration with synthetic biologists, inorganic chemists, and scientists working in other rising disciplines, or will we allow the emergent technologies to dictate the boundaries of what’s possible without architectural input?
My experience is that scientists tend to largely embrace the consilient attitude, and part of the focus of my practice is to experiment with alternative attitudes that give birth to new ideas about what architecture is and what the role of the architect might become. Increasingly, this work is beginning to be carried out in the laboratory: the quest for a way of turning loose sand into habitable sandstone structures saw me donning a white coat from the biophysics department at UCL, London, while our search for ways of directing crystal growth into built volumes sees me and my colleagues currently spending time peering through safety glasses in the same institution’s inorganic chemistry lab. Our ultimate goal is for this experimentation with different material manipulations to yield architecturally, structurally, formally and phenomenologically logical buildings and landscapes. While we’re not exclusively designing within this paradigm, it is one of the design spaces we keep interrogating for clues about where architecture might go next.
Three landscape projects currently in progress might help to illustrate our attitude towards this field. The most widely published of these is the proposal Dune – Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture, based on a novel process of engineered architectural lithification.
An ever-present element in the material history of architecture, without sand there would be no brick, no concrete, no glass; even wooden structures are sanded down to smoothen their edges. It is also an incredibly renewable material: one billion grains of sand come into existence around the world every second through a cyclic process that sees entire mountain ranges weather and release miniscule splinters of quartz and other finely divided rock and mineral particles. Some of the fragments lithify (from lithos, Greek for ‘stone’ or ‘rock’), into a clastic sedimentary rock, a sandstone. As that sandstone weathers, new grains break free. A typical mountain will be lowered by a few millimetres every year.
That amounts to a lot of sand. Dry areas cover more than one-third of the earth’s land surface, and desertification – “the diminution or destruction of the biological potential of the land” – is a major threat on all continents, affecting more than 100 countires in the world. Some estimates suggest that the livelihoods of 850 million people are at risk, spread out across 35 percent of the Earth’s land surface.
While sand dunes cover only about one fifth of our deserts, those extreme areas are good places to introduce a barrier of greenery in order to halt the shifting sands and stop the dunes from migrating. The idea of a ‘Green Wall for the Sahara’ was first proposed by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005. The initiative originally called for 23 African countries to come together in order to plant trees across a 15 kilometres wide stretch south of the Sahara.
The Dune project would turn 6,000 kilometres of sand into a pan-African sandstone city and support the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and Sahel Initiative through a localised cementation of the desert sand via microbially induced carbonate precipitation (MICP) using the bacterium Bacillus pasteurii, which is capable of producing enough calcite to technically turn sand into sandstone in a very short space of time. The spatial pockets created within the resulting solid, sedimentary rock structure would help retain scarce water and mineral resources, while also serving as habitable and programmable spaces – a habitable wall straddling an entire continent, binding villages, people, and countries together.13
If the use of controlled microbial precipitation is not original enough (while not yet part of the scheme, we acknowledge that programming the bacteria using methods similar to those of professor Voigt could potentially add another dimension to that control mechanism), the idea of working directly within the material volume itself certainly is. This strategy has been imaginatively compared to “a kind of infection of the earth… a vast 3D printer made of bacteria (that) crawls undetectably through the deserts of the world, printing new landscapes into existence over the course of 10,000 years”.14 Using the existing sand dunes as granular readymade structures is arguably a radical approach to the sourcing of local materials: a delicately deviced construction method that adjusts the composition of the dunescape interior just enough to create a structurally valid composition within it.
The Moon Dune project seeks to translate the same idea into a space architecture context, constructing a lunar cratertecture out of a new (thus far theoretical) material, made from bacteria and regolith, which we call bacillith. An alternative to existing proposals for in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU), this method is put forward as an idea for how we might grow and farm building materials in space, an logical continuation of those schemes, referred to as Class III habitats, that are based on the use of in-situ lunar materials. In the past, such plans have mainly focused on techniques such as lunar concrete, sintered or vitreous masonry, and bulk-regolith applications.15
Getting anything into space is an expensive and cumbersome affair; element sizes are restricted by launch constraints, and new limitations are continuously imposed with each step of the process, from structural engineering through to construction management. This reduces the number of valid design proposals: historically, comparatively few schemes have ventured beyond the tried-and-tested core-and-modules typology, the lunar equivalent of the late Kisho Kurokawa’s groundbreaking 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower, flipped on its side.
A bacillith-based strategy could allow for a much wider range of spatial configurations and articulations, while keeping the distribution costs down as much as possible. Sending vials of propagative microbes to the Moon is arguably a less burdensome method than moving larger volumes of building materials or elements; the initial strains could be made to reproduce when they arrive at their final destination rather than on Earth. Again, once the synthetic biologists become even better at programming bacteria, the microorganisms can be much more precisely deployed, perhaps even controlled (robotically) from Earth. Entire structures could be created inside of the existing lunar craters in a similar way to the sand dunes on this planet. The difference between bacillith and lunar concrete would essentially be that between the renewable bacteria and the permanently depleted cement.
Crystal Lines, finally, explores a different avenue, venturing into inorganic chemistry and investigating the concept of growing both material and binding agent at the same time – taking us one step further towards a truly programmable, extreme minimalist architecture, in which different densities and molecular or cellular arrangements within the same material mass is what differentiates wall from aperture, membrane from surface, and so on. Substrate structures are seeded with crystals and grown within liquid baths. Over and above the shape of the substrate, three control factors incluence the form of the resulting structure: the chemistry of the fluid, the conditions under which it is being solidified, and the ambient pressure it is under. Time becomes an important design factor, like in the construction fantasies of American-Canadian writer William Gibson:
…you could see those towers growing at night. Rooms up top like a honeycomb, and walls just sealing themselves over, one after another (…) Like watching a candle melt, but in reverse.16
While still remaining work in progress, this scheme is the latest of our excursions into the largely unchartered territory that lies at the intersection of architecture and contemporary science. Crystallography, he experimental science of the arrangement of atoms in solids, has been a research topic at least since 1669, when Danish anatomy/geology pioneer Nicolaus Steno (Niels Stensen) noticed that quartz crystals, no matter where they came from or what size they were, always had the same set of characteristic angles between their faces. And yet, I don’t know of a single design experiment that has been aimed at growing crystals into architecture (Roger Hiorn’s prize-winning 2008 installation Seizure was an interior; Tokujin Yoshioka’s Venus chair from the same year a piece of furniture). If the Dune project is an experiment in biological landscape architecture on the continental scale, and Moon Dune a scheme that stretches across the heavens towards an astronomical scale, then Crystal Lines is a return to the human scale, with some designs conceived as individual buildings, although we do also consider ideas based on the seeding of entire Endorheic drainage basins with crystalline structures that could slowly emerge as water is channeled away from the basin walls.
There is a fourth scale that I haven’t touched upon yet, but which we would love to design for: the inner landscape of the human body. In 1967, dedicated medical researcher Larry L. Hench happened to sit next to a US Army colonel on a bus – a chance meeting that led to a discussion about why it should be impossible to create a material that survives exposure to the human body. The colonel had witnessed many amputations in Vietnamn that were due to the body rejecting the parts available to surgeons. The conversation spurred Hench on to discover Bioglass, the first material to form a living bond with the host tissues.17 Architects design bio-medical research centres, but they rarely get involved in the designs that come out of those buildings. It seems natural in a near future of consilient collaboration between the fields of synthetic biology (in which scientists already use bacteria to identify malignant cells within the body and deliver therapeutics where needed) and architecture that architects would start designing for the interior of the body.
We are actively initiating collaborations across all of these scales, from the medical professions through to advanced designs for outer space, from the incredibly small to the incomprehensibly vast. In our aggressively accelerating culture, architects need to reinterpret and broaden the scope of their discipline to exceed the design of the built environment at the human or landscape scale in a terrestrial context. We need to embrace design challenges at the medical nano scale and the astronomical scale of the universe. This calls for a widened approach and an intensified communication and collaboration with experts in fields that have traditionally not been directly associated with architecture.
I have returned on a few occasions in this essay to the idea of consilience, the unity (or literally “jumping together”) of knowledge. Coined by William Whewell in 1840, it is a term that has come to denote the cross-pollination of ideas from different branches of knowledge. All but forgotten by the broader public, the term was resurrected by humanist biologist Edward O. Wilson in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.18 In one passage, Wilson calls Einstein “the architect of grand unification in physics” and describes him as “Ionian to the core”. He’s referring, of course, to the Ionian school of philosophy, Thales and his successors, who during the 6th century BC abandoned traditional explanations of natural phenomena derived from religions and myths for hypotheses based on ideas gained from personal experience and reflection – initial glimpses of what later became known as the scientific attitude.
Undoubtedly, to some readers, the ideas discussed above will seem greatly exaggerated, the proposed architecture projects closer to mythical fantasies of the 21st century than to scientifically rational Ionian landscapes. And yet I would argue they are perfectly logical responses to a world accelerating exponentially through our contemporary condition of extreme technological and scientific evolution. I’m not a natural scientist, but I too share Wilson’s urge to dream about territories for which there are no maps:
“I admit that the confidence of natural scientists often seems overweening. Science offers the boldest metaphysics of the age. It is a thoroughly human construct, driven by the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow come clearer and we wil grasp the true strangeness of the universe. And the strangeness will all prove to be connected and make sense.”19
Hopefully, one day, the strangeness above will connect and begin to make sense.
Magnus Larsson
Get the full-text version here: http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=844473132132231;res=IELHSS

Moon Dune – Bacillithic Cratertecture

The potential for microbial life to adapt and evolve in environments beyond this planet is the starting point for our proposal to create a new material that would facilitate the future colonisation of the  Moon. Working Earth bacteria straight into the lunar regolith might be one in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) strategy.

  • moondune-05
  • moondune-04
  • moondune-03
  • moondune-02
  • moondune-01

In the narrative world, there is a long and proud history of such fictional materials, from the super-hard adamant (the material that the fictitious flying island is made of in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which takes on magnetic properties allowing its hovering ability), via Isaac Asimov’s invention thiotimoline, a fabricated compound with chemical bonds that project back to the past and into the future, through to the balthorium used in the Russians’ doomsday device in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove.

Science is also no stranger to imagined materials: the success of Russian chemistry professor  Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev’s periodic table in 1869 (as opposed to that published independently by Julius Lothar Meyer the following year) came partly from his leaving gaps in the table for corresponding elements that had not yet been discovered. In the years following Mendeleev’s publication, the gaps were filled as chemists discovered more chemical elements. While the last naturally occurring element to be discovered was francium in 1939, the periodic table has since grown with the addition of synthetic and transuranic elements.
This chapter describes a process whereby lunar architecture would be made from the speculative material bacillith, a combination of terrestrial bacteria and the Moon’s regolith. The resulting ISRU structure would require launching less rockets into space compared to similar proposals that have been made in the past.
Buy the chapter (or the book) here: http://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-27969-0_28

 

Coffee

Do Whatever Ordinary People Do!

Do you like materials? Are you fond of architecture that uses the ordinary to achieve the extraordinary? Are you ambitious, stress resistant, used to working flexible hours, and more interested in gaining experience than becoming rich? In that case, we want you!

 

Ordinary is always interested in finding new colleagues with some experience in all phases of the design and construction process to work on new projects in our London studio. We are currently particularly interested in designers with a good working knowledge of Rhino and 3D Studio Max.

 

It is a plus if you possess strong communication skills, technical abilities, and personal interest in scientific work within disciplines such as material sciences/biology/synthetic biology/chemistry/etc.

 

If you are interested in becoming a part of Ordinary, please submit, by email, a resume or curriculum vitae along with at least five excerpts that best represent your professional and academic work. Files should be in PDF format and not to exceed 2MB, if possible, and be sent to jobs@anordinarywebsite.com. If you would prefer not to send work samples by email, please mail them to:

 

Ordinary Ltd

Att: Jobs

Cell studios

Grosvenor Works

Grosvenor Way

Mount Pleasant Hill

London E5 9NE

 

Please do not send links to websites, ftp postings or any format not described above. We look forward to hearing from you.

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Contact

 

Please direct all press inquiries to: press@anordinarywebsite.com

Please direct all other inquiries to: enquiries@anordinarywebsite.com

How to Get in Touch with Ordinary

Are you interested in commissioning a building or an installation? Would you like to know more about our work at the intersection of architecture and synthetic biology? Are you interested in having Ordinary lecture at your event, contribute to your magazine or scientific publication, or take part in your exhibition? Please drop us a line using the details below.

Please direct new business inquiries to: magnus@anordinarywebsite.com

Please direct all press inquiries to: press@anordinarywebsite.com

Please direct all job-seeking inquiries to: jobs@anordinarywebsite.com

Please direct all other inquiries to: enquiries@anordinarywebsite.com

 

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Ordinary Ltd

Cell studios

Grosvenor Works

Grosvenor Way

Mount Pleasant Hill

London E5 9NE

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Say Hi to Ordinary!

Ordinary Ltd is a London-based design studio. Founded in 2011 by long-time collaborators Magnus Larsson and Alex Kaiser, Ordinary explores strategies for how material research might combine with radically speculative experimentation to push architecture beyond biomimicry as well as past mere sustainability.

 

At the vanguard of a new generation of designers, Ordinary poses a question that is as old as architecture itself: What are materials, and how can they be used to create wondrous buildings that support breathtaking cities? How can we use novel materials to make novel architecture? The studio initiates projects, lectures widely on the international stage, and has been extensively published in both popular and academic press.

 

From an east London workshop that doubles as a makeshift biology/chemistry lab, Ordinary experiments with the future of building materials, turning wild ideas into ordinary realities. Recent design projects include a proposal for a 6,000-kilometer long city made from bacteria and sand, a 120-meter tall timber skyscraper, a pavilion made entirely from crystals, and buildings spun by genetically modified spiders.

Just Another Ordinary Breakfast

Lewis Carroll once said, ”Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast”. We have too. But getting together for breakfast in the morning allows us to discuss some of those impossible things, and maybe even make one or two of them become reality. Here’s the current studio breakfast menu.

 

Black coffee

Tea (milk optional)

Croissants

Muffins

Bagels

Yoghurt

Fruit

Cottage cheese

Baby plum tomatoes

Cheese (different varieties)

Cigarette (optional)

 

Breakfast is served in the workshop every day between 9am and 10am.

An Ordinary Workshop

The first thing that happened at Ordinary in 2013 was that we relocated to new premises. We are now permanently installed in a workshop that we share with our highly acclaimed friends at the art production company M-A-K-E. Apart from your regular workshop tools (ranging from bench drills to bandsaws), the studio now also features a synthetic biology lab, a vertical CNC router, and a (relatively) dust-free computer corner.

 

…not to mention facilities for screen printing, electronics, woodwork, metal work, framing, painting, and spray finishing. We love surprise visits – please do come and see us and learn more about what we do at:

 

Ordinary Ltd

Cell studios 

Grosvenor Works

Grosvenor Way

Mount Pleasant Hill

London E5 9NE

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Dune – Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture

A single grain of sand is almost nothing: a splinter of rock, a miniscule fragment of a geological formation, the residue of a microcosmic event. Myriad grains together, however, become almost everything: mesmerising landscapes, vast deserts, a fluid material capable of being transformed into not just solid structures but a novel desert architecture.

 

In aggregates of sand, interlocking angular quartz grains, we find fascinating forms and emergent patterns; possibilities, potentials, substance. In short, we find a constant unfolding of interactive opportunities – a material logic that we might use to sculpt buildings out of the desert.
Without sand there would be no brick, no concrete, no glass. Even wooden structures are sanded down to smoothen their edges. Sand is an incredibly renewable material: one billion grains of sand come into existence around the world every second through a cyclic process that sees entire mountain ranges weather and release miniscule splinters. Some of those fragments lithify (from lithos, Greek for »stone« or »rock«), into a clastic sedimentary rock, a sandstone. As that sandstone weathers, new grains break free. A typical mountain will be lowered by a few millimetres every year.
That amounts to a lot of sand. Dry areas cover more than one-third of the earth’s land surface, and desertification – »the diminution or destruction of the biological potential of the land« – is a major threat on all continents, affecting more than 100 countires in the world. Some estimates suggest that the livelihoods of 850 million people are at risk, spread out across 35 percent of the Earth’s land surface.
The idea of introduce a barrier of greenery in order to halt the shifting sands, building a »Green Wall for the Sahara,« was first proposed by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005. The initiative originally called for 23 African countries to come together in order to plant trees across a 15 kilometres wide stretch south of the Sahara in order to stop the dunes from migrating.
The Dune project would turn 6,000 kilometres of sand into a pan-African sandstone city that supports this Great Green Wall through a localised cementation of desert sand via microbially induced carbonate precipitation (MICP) using the bacteriumBacillus pasteurii, which is capable of producing enough calcite to technically turn sand into sandstone in a very short space of time. The spatial pockets created within the resulting solid rock structure would help retain scarce water and mineral resources, while also serving as programmable spaces – a habitable wall straddling an entire continent, binding villages, people, and countries together.
Dune was presented at TED Global in July 2009. You can see the presentation here: http://www.ted.com/talks/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html
Dune was presented as a chapter in Macro-engineering Seawater in Unique Environments
(2011). Buy the chapter (or the book) here: http://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-14779-1_20

 

Moon Dune – Bacillithic Cratertecture

The potential for microbial life to adapt and evolve in environments beyond this planet is the starting point for our proposal to create a new material that would facilitate the future colonisation of the Moon. Working Earth bacteria straight into the lunar regolith might be one in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) strategy.
  • Moon-at-night2_fixed
  • 08-Buildup
  • 07-Technical-Drawing
  • 06-Planting-Bacteria
  • 01---From-above-robot-construction

In the narrative world, there is a long and proud history of such fictional materials, from the super-hard adamant (the material that the fictitious flying island is made of in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which takes on magnetic properties allowing its hovering ability), via Isaac Asimov’s invention thiotimoline, a fabricated compound with chemical bonds that project back to the past and into the future, through to the balthorium used in the Russians’ doomsday device in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove.

Science is also no stranger to imagined materials: the success of Russian chemistry professor  Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev’s periodic table in 1869 (as opposed to that published independently by Julius Lothar Meyer the following year) came partly from his leaving gaps in the table for corresponding elements that had not yet been discovered. In the years following Mendeleev’s publication, the gaps were filled as chemists discovered more chemical elements. While the last naturally occurring element to be discovered was francium in 1939, the periodic table has since grown with the addition of synthetic and transuranic elements.
This chapter describes a process whereby lunar architecture would be made from the speculative material bacillith, a combination of terrestrial bacteria and the Moon’s regolith. The resulting ISRU structure would require launching less rockets into space compared to similar proposals that have been made in the past.
Buy the chapter (or the book) here: http://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-27969-0_28

 

 

Low-Density Living to a T

LOG is an ongoing project carried out in collaboration with Professor Ulf Arne Girhammar at the Luleå University of Technology. The objective is to propose alternative future scenarios for the timber skyscraper typology.

Based on an exhaustive investigation of the possibilities of wood in large-scale architecture, the t Scraper typology is the novel organisational principle behind three timber skyscrapers – Perch, Porous, and Punch. Simple t modules are stacked in different ways to create configurations that break with the ”rational” tradition of stacking envelope-sized floor plates on top of each other.
The resulting buildings challenge predominant notions of the optimisation of space – ther than creating high-density architecture, the project argues the case for low-density buildings, in which new ways of living can be explored. The resulting three skyscrapers are all essays in low-density living.
The structural and proportional organisation of the t scraper strikes us as particularly elegant: a horisontal volume at a 1:4 ratio is lightly but resolutely lifted off the ground by two cubic units, only to in turn prop up another horisontal unit, which is given secondary support by its own column of three equilateral boxes, repeating the 1:4 relationship between the elements. This ingenious typology pushes the building into the sky seemingly without effort: a simple choreography of stacked boxes.

 

 

 

Coming Soon at end of table (Studio)

The New Order: Ionian Landscapes (Kerb Magazine)

For Kerb Magazine #19, we shared our vision of a newfangled role for architecture, and reflected on future bacillithical and crystalline landscapes extending across four different scales, from the incredibly small to the incomprehensibly vast.

 

Man can only do what nature permits him to do. Man does not invent anything. He makes discoveries of principles operative in nature and often finds ways of generalizing those principles and reapplying them in surprise directions. That is called invention. But he does not do anything artificial. Nature has to permit it, and if nature permits it, it is natural. There is naught which is unnatural.1
On 13 January this year, the most venerable science journal in the world, Nature, published an article with the snappy title Robust multicellular computing using genetically encoded NOR gates and chemical ‘wires’. The first sentence reads “Computation underlies the organization of cells into higher-order structures, for example during development or the spatial association of bacteria in a biofilm,” and I dare guess not many Nature-reading architects raised an eyebrow.2
But they should have.
Multicellular computing is about writing software to control the creation of genetic circuits in microbes – “pathways of genes, proteins, and other biomolecules that the cells use to perform a particular task, such as breaking down sugar and turning it into fuel,” to quote an interview with co-author Chistopher Voigt in MIT’s Technology Review.3
Voigt and his colleagues have already managed to create basic circuit components in the bacterium Escherichia coli, and are now “trying to make the cell understand where it is and what it should be doing based on its understanding of the world”. This understanding is aided through giving bacteria the senses of touch, sight, and smell. Euqipped with this, the cells can be programmed on an abstract level like robots and made to perform complex, coordinated tasks.
The implication for architecture is breathtaking. Once the materials we use become biologically programmable, the very nature of the discipline is bound to change irrevocably: while interdisciplinary research has already begun to yield metamaterials (artificial materials engineered to have properties that go beyond those found in nature), the use of computational processes to control cellular compositions essentially gives us the power to precisely configure the built environment, expanding vastly our capacity to use programmable bacteria as building elements.
The most exciting topic within architecture today is biology. This is not surprising: arguably, the most interesting evolution of society today is happening in biology, in particular within the synthetic field of the brilliant professor Voigt, who quickly got snapped up by MIT once his paper was made public. Architecture takes its cues from prevailing scientific and cultural movements, and at the moment, we’re working within a veritable explosion of new biology. This naturally shapes today’s (or at least tomorrow’s) architecture much as the explosion of data and computers shaped architecture throughout the 20th century.
Molecular nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler is one contemporary scientist who probably saw this coming. As early as 1986 he wrote that:
“…now biochemists have gone to work examining the machines that build, repair, and control cells. They have learned to assemble viruses and reprogram bacteria. For the first time in history, people are examining their molecules and unraveling the molecular secrets of life. It seems that molecular engineers will eventually combine improved biochemical knowledge with improved molecular machines, learning to repair damaged tissue structures and so rejuvenate them.”4
25 years later, science has almost caught up with Drexler’s thinking. Voigt’s progress is a major step forward in the process of giving genetically modified microbes a job, but as American inventor, entrepreneur, author, and Drexler supporter Ray Kurzweil has pointed out, utilising full-scale nanoengineering to construct macroscale objects at the molecular scale is “still considered a middle to late 2020s technology”.5
Another of Kurzweil’s observations is that long-term trends are interesting because “an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started”.6 Extrapolated to the field of architecture in the age of synthetic biology, this could be taken as a call to action: maybe it is time to start designing for materials and processes that don’t even exist.
Materials and processes that don’t exist yet, that is. The new generation of synthetic biologists fronted by leading lights such as Voigt is clearly going beyond the examination of molecular secrets described by Drexler. Soon they will be able to control the biological machines that control cells, and when that happens, a whole new realm of architecture opens up, based on “the design rules by which simple logic can be harnessed to produce diverse and complex calculations by rewiring communication between cells”.7 To extend the machine metaphor, Le Corbusier enjoyed talking about the house as a machine for living in.7 Ray Kurzweil named one of his books The Age of Intelligent Machines,8 while leading theorist, author, and founding editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, pronounced the future of machines to be biology.9
If Voigt’s programmable genetic circuit is the latest addition to that trajectory and we learn to create novel materials from computer-controlled synthetic ecosystems, then architects might soon be designing intelligent biological machines for living in. An architect’s technical drawing could contain new sets of instructions: instead of material specifications, perhaps timings for the release of quorum molecules within the bacterially controlled material volume; instead of dimensions, spatial configurations of the bacterial colonies; instead of surface treatments, programmed instructions detailing the precise mapping of where microbe robots will release, emit, repair, cover, coat, glaze, deposit, decompose, etch, polish, grind…
What would the next evolutionary step be? Perhaps architectural machines built from a new sub class of reconfigurable, computational biomaterials that are able to fundamentally change their properties and characteristics beyond traditional notions of self-assembly, in accordance with chemical signal inputs received from a human designer. A spectacular design strategy falling somewhere between in silico and in vivo, sculpting with code in real time on a microbial scale. Such machines, moreover, would double as living, reprogrammable memory storage units. Their performative properties could be programmed to change with incoming data; they could save and play back previous configuration patterns for control purposes; they could even host “internal debates” within their own material structures to inform responses to incoming parameters: Voigt’s NOR gates can be combined to perform any logical operation, and some of his bacterial circuits hack into existing bacterial communication systems called quorum sensing, based on the local density of their population, allowing the cells to increase the quality of the computations performed by “voting” on an output.10
At its most fundamental, architecture is about densifications of matter. The design of our built environment is an accretive process of aggregation and erosion, extending across different scales: cellular accumulations become material articulations that become spatial environments that become built artefacts that become manipulated landscapes that in their most intense states become that greatest of all human inventions: cities.
The construction of completely new organisms lays the groundwork for the construction of completely new materials, and the construction of completely new materials suggests the possibility of new architectures, which can in turn provide a basis for the creation of new kinds of urban realities, alternative and innovative cities, perfect acts of landscape architecture. As biology goes from being a descriptive science to being an engineering science, architecture has the rare chance to go beyond metaphor: instead of Mies van der Rohe’s “exoskeletal” steel frames at the IIT campus in Chicago, Illinois, we can design novel architectural experiences using materials that are programmed to actually be exoskeletal; instead of biomorphic references to living forms, we can design the living forms themselves.
Biotechnology engineers and scientists from MIT, Harvard, and UCSF have created an archive of standardised interchangeable biological parts called BioBricks, sequences of DNA that can perform particular functions, a toolbox filled with biological materials that work as molecules inside living organisms and can be used to engineer biological systems.11 By analogy, today’s ubiquitous use of scripted geometries in architecture, automated modelling through conditional and iterative command executions, could extend to biomaterial manipulations at the material scale, literally injecting new life into coded actions such as arraying, offsetting, trimming, and exploding our designs. Ultimately, the skill of the programmer sets the limits for what is possible within such a system: Voigt has already programmed a strain of Salmonella to make and spin its own spider silk, a substance as strong as, but ten times more elastic than, kevlar.12
So where does this leave the architect? Is she to become a combined designer, synthetic biologist, material scientist, biological engineer, and bio-programmer? Or simply a more consilient architect, capable of directing people from disciplines that have traditionally not been associated with architecture (or which didn’t even exist before)? Will architects reclaim the role of conceptual originator with a license to initiate design investigations beyond the tried and tested? Will we work in close collaboration with synthetic biologists, inorganic chemists, and scientists working in other rising disciplines, or will we allow the emergent technologies to dictate the boundaries of what’s possible without architectural input?
My experience is that scientists tend to largely embrace the consilient attitude, and part of the focus of my practice is to experiment with alternative attitudes that give birth to new ideas about what architecture is and what the role of the architect might become. Increasingly, this work is beginning to be carried out in the laboratory: the quest for a way of turning loose sand into habitable sandstone structures saw me donning a white coat from the biophysics department at UCL, London, while our search for ways of directing crystal growth into built volumes sees me and my colleagues currently spending time peering through safety glasses in the same institution’s inorganic chemistry lab. Our ultimate goal is for this experimentation with different material manipulations to yield architecturally, structurally, formally and phenomenologically logical buildings and landscapes. While we’re not exclusively designing within this paradigm, it is one of the design spaces we keep interrogating for clues about where architecture might go next.
Three landscape projects currently in progress might help to illustrate our attitude towards this field. The most widely published of these is the proposal Dune – Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture, based on a novel process of engineered architectural lithification.
An ever-present element in the material history of architecture, without sand there would be no brick, no concrete, no glass; even wooden structures are sanded down to smoothen their edges. It is also an incredibly renewable material: one billion grains of sand come into existence around the world every second through a cyclic process that sees entire mountain ranges weather and release miniscule splinters of quartz and other finely divided rock and mineral particles. Some of the fragments lithify (from lithos, Greek for ‘stone’ or ‘rock’), into a clastic sedimentary rock, a sandstone. As that sandstone weathers, new grains break free. A typical mountain will be lowered by a few millimetres every year.
That amounts to a lot of sand. Dry areas cover more than one-third of the earth’s land surface, and desertification – “the diminution or destruction of the biological potential of the land” – is a major threat on all continents, affecting more than 100 countires in the world. Some estimates suggest that the livelihoods of 850 million people are at risk, spread out across 35 percent of the Earth’s land surface.
While sand dunes cover only about one fifth of our deserts, those extreme areas are good places to introduce a barrier of greenery in order to halt the shifting sands and stop the dunes from migrating. The idea of a ‘Green Wall for the Sahara’ was first proposed by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005. The initiative originally called for 23 African countries to come together in order to plant trees across a 15 kilometres wide stretch south of the Sahara.
The Dune project would turn 6,000 kilometres of sand into a pan-African sandstone city and support the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and Sahel Initiative through a localised cementation of the desert sand via microbially induced carbonate precipitation (MICP) using the bacterium Bacillus pasteurii, which is capable of producing enough calcite to technically turn sand into sandstone in a very short space of time. The spatial pockets created within the resulting solid, sedimentary rock structure would help retain scarce water and mineral resources, while also serving as habitable and programmable spaces – a habitable wall straddling an entire continent, binding villages, people, and countries together.13
If the use of controlled microbial precipitation is not original enough (while not yet part of the scheme, we acknowledge that programming the bacteria using methods similar to those of professor Voigt could potentially add another dimension to that control mechanism), the idea of working directly within the material volume itself certainly is. This strategy has been imaginatively compared to “a kind of infection of the earth… a vast 3D printer made of bacteria (that) crawls undetectably through the deserts of the world, printing new landscapes into existence over the course of 10,000 years”.14 Using the existing sand dunes as granular readymade structures is arguably a radical approach to the sourcing of local materials: a delicately deviced construction method that adjusts the composition of the dunescape interior just enough to create a structurally valid composition within it.
The Moon Dune project seeks to translate the same idea into a space architecture context, constructing a lunar cratertecture out of a new (thus far theoretical) material, made from bacteria and regolith, which we call bacillith. An alternative to existing proposals for in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU), this method is put forward as an idea for how we might grow and farm building materials in space, an logical continuation of those schemes, referred to as Class III habitats, that are based on the use of in-situ lunar materials. In the past, such plans have mainly focused on techniques such as lunar concrete, sintered or vitreous masonry, and bulk-regolith applications.15
Getting anything into space is an expensive and cumbersome affair; element sizes are restricted by launch constraints, and new limitations are continuously imposed with each step of the process, from structural engineering through to construction management. This reduces the number of valid design proposals: historically, comparatively few schemes have ventured beyond the tried-and-tested core-and-modules typology, the lunar equivalent of the late Kisho Kurokawa’s groundbreaking 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower, flipped on its side.
A bacillith-based strategy could allow for a much wider range of spatial configurations and articulations, while keeping the distribution costs down as much as possible. Sending vials of propagative microbes to the Moon is arguably a less burdensome method than moving larger volumes of building materials or elements; the initial strains could be made to reproduce when they arrive at their final destination rather than on Earth. Again, once the synthetic biologists become even better at programming bacteria, the microorganisms can be much more precisely deployed, perhaps even controlled (robotically) from Earth. Entire structures could be created inside of the existing lunar craters in a similar way to the sand dunes on this planet. The difference between bacillith and lunar concrete would essentially be that between the renewable bacteria and the permanently depleted cement.
Crystal Lines, finally, explores a different avenue, venturing into inorganic chemistry and investigating the concept of growing both material and binding agent at the same time – taking us one step further towards a truly programmable, extreme minimalist architecture, in which different densities and molecular or cellular arrangements within the same material mass is what differentiates wall from aperture, membrane from surface, and so on. Substrate structures are seeded with crystals and grown within liquid baths. Over and above the shape of the substrate, three control factors incluence the form of the resulting structure: the chemistry of the fluid, the conditions under which it is being solidified, and the ambient pressure it is under. Time becomes an important design factor, like in the construction fantasies of American-Canadian writer William Gibson:
…you could see those towers growing at night. Rooms up top like a honeycomb, and walls just sealing themselves over, one after another (…) Like watching a candle melt, but in reverse.16
While still remaining work in progress, this scheme is the latest of our excursions into the largely unchartered territory that lies at the intersection of architecture and contemporary science. Crystallography, he experimental science of the arrangement of atoms in solids, has been a research topic at least since 1669, when Danish anatomy/geology pioneer Nicolaus Steno (Niels Stensen) noticed that quartz crystals, no matter where they came from or what size they were, always had the same set of characteristic angles between their faces. And yet, I don’t know of a single design experiment that has been aimed at growing crystals into architecture (Roger Hiorn’s prize-winning 2008 installation Seizure was an interior; Tokujin Yoshioka’s Venus chair from the same year a piece of furniture). If the Dune project is an experiment in biological landscape architecture on the continental scale, and Moon Dune a scheme that stretches across the heavens towards an astronomical scale, then Crystal Lines is a return to the human scale, with some designs conceived as individual buildings, although we do also consider ideas based on the seeding of entire Endorheic drainage basins with crystalline structures that could slowly emerge as water is channeled away from the basin walls.
There is a fourth scale that I haven’t touched upon yet, but which we would love to design for: the inner landscape of the human body. In 1967, dedicated medical researcher Larry L. Hench happened to sit next to a US Army colonel on a bus – a chance meeting that led to a discussion about why it should be impossible to create a material that survives exposure to the human body. The colonel had witnessed many amputations in Vietnamn that were due to the body rejecting the parts available to surgeons. The conversation spurred Hench on to discover Bioglass, the first material to form a living bond with the host tissues.17 Architects design bio-medical research centres, but they rarely get involved in the designs that come out of those buildings. It seems natural in a near future of consilient collaboration between the fields of synthetic biology (in which scientists already use bacteria to identify malignant cells within the body and deliver therapeutics where needed) and architecture that architects would start designing for the interior of the body.
We are actively initiating collaborations across all of these scales, from the medical professions through to advanced designs for outer space, from the incredibly small to the incomprehensibly vast. In our aggressively accelerating culture, architects need to reinterpret and broaden the scope of their discipline to exceed the design of the built environment at the human or landscape scale in a terrestrial context. We need to embrace design challenges at the medical nano scale and the astronomical scale of the universe. This calls for a widened approach and an intensified communication and collaboration with experts in fields that have traditionally not been directly associated with architecture.
I have returned on a few occasions in this essay to the idea of consilience, the unity (or literally “jumping together”) of knowledge. Coined by William Whewell in 1840, it is a term that has come to denote the cross-pollination of ideas from different branches of knowledge. All but forgotten by the broader public, the term was resurrected by humanist biologist Edward O. Wilson in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.18 In one passage, Wilson calls Einstein “the architect of grand unification in physics” and describes him as “Ionian to the core”. He’s referring, of course, to the Ionian school of philosophy, Thales and his successors, who during the 6th century BC abandoned traditional explanations of natural phenomena derived from religions and myths for hypotheses based on ideas gained from personal experience and reflection – initial glimpses of what later became known as the scientific attitude.
Undoubtedly, to some readers, the ideas discussed above will seem greatly exaggerated, the proposed architecture projects closer to mythical fantasies of the 21st century than to scientifically rational Ionian landscapes. And yet I would argue they are perfectly logical responses to a world accelerating exponentially through our contemporary condition of extreme technological and scientific evolution. I’m not a natural scientist, but I too share Wilson’s urge to dream about territories for which there are no maps:
“I admit that the confidence of natural scientists often seems overweening. Science offers the boldest metaphysics of the age. It is a thoroughly human construct, driven by the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow come clearer and we wil grasp the true strangeness of the universe. And the strangeness will all prove to be connected and make sense.”19
Hopefully, one day, the strangeness above will connect and begin to make sense.
Magnus Larsson
Get the full-text version here: http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=844473132132231;res=IELHSS

Perch – Low-Density Timber Skyscraper

Perch is our initial investigation of the low density concept, with vertical volumes propping up horizontal units, leaving a large (10m x 10m) void space as a quadrangle running the entire height of the building. Furthermore, it challenges its initial boundary condition through a series of rotated bridges that cross through this open courtyard, stitching their way from one side of the building to the next, floating inside of the 100m2 vertical piazza.

The bridges that shoot through this vertical piazza are an example of what we call semi-public spaces, that is, spatial volumes programmed to be shared by the inhabitants of the building: places to get together for a game of chess or a glass of wine, to tend to a collective garden, watch a film, or maybe (if you work from home) have a business meeting.

This combination of two typologies – the t scraper configuration and the habitable bridge, is perhaps not entirely dissimilar to one of us architect Steven Holl’s projects, the Gymnasium-Bridge in South Bronx, New York (1977). This project saw an enclosed pedestrian bridge shoot from the South Bronx to the park on Randall’s Island, condensing, as the architect puts it in his 1989 book Anchoring, »the activities of meeting, physical recreation, and work into one structure«.

This hybrid between levels of stacked modules and habitable bridges generate interest in what could have become a slightly anonymous (if still fairly unconventional) elevation. The living units are intertwined, forming snake-like patterns reminiscent of a Chinese Puzzle. This leads to scenarios in which an inhabitant will occupy a volume that spans some 15 or even 20 metres into the air, connected to two communal bridges that add a further potential 10 metres or so. While the living units at the smaller end of the spectrum – we have gone to great lengths to ensure we cater to residents of different ages and economic circumstances – might be fairly small in terms of square meterage, the floor-to-ceiling height and expansive feeling of living with the quadrangular void on one side and the city on the other ends up creating a great foundation for a very high living quality. Looking out the window of her flat on the 17th floor, a young student would probably be rather pleased with her accommodation.

Perch also features a timber lattice that runs in between its solid panels. At times, this grid carries sheets of glass, at times it becomes a bookshelf, at times it holds lighting, at times it becomes a trellis for plants to grow on, at times it supports the servicing of the building.

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Dune – Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture

A single grain of sand is almost nothing: a splinter of rock, a miniscule fragment of a geological formation, the residue of a microcosmic event. Myriad grains together, however, become almost everything: mesmerising landscapes, vast deserts, a fluid material capable of being transformed into not just solid structures but a novel desert architecture.

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In aggregates of sand, interlocking angular quartz grains, we find fascinating forms and emergent patterns; possibilities, potentials, substance. In short, we find a constant unfolding of interactive opportunities – a material logic that we might use to sculpt buildings out of the desert.
Without sand there would be no brick, no concrete, no glass. Even wooden structures are sanded down to smoothen their edges. Sand is an incredibly renewable material: one billion grains of sand come into existence around the world every second through a cyclic process that sees entire mountain ranges weather and release miniscule splinters. Some of those fragments lithify (from lithos, Greek for »stone« or »rock«), into a clastic sedimentary rock, a sandstone. As that sandstone weathers, new grains break free. A typical mountain will be lowered by a few millimetres every year.
That amounts to a lot of sand. Dry areas cover more than one-third of the earth’s land surface, and desertification – »the diminution or destruction of the biological potential of the land« – is a major threat on all continents, affecting more than 100 countires in the world. Some estimates suggest that the livelihoods of 850 million people are at risk, spread out across 35 percent of the Earth’s land surface.
The idea of introduce a barrier of greenery in order to halt the shifting sands, building a »Green Wall for the Sahara,« was first proposed by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005. The initiative originally called for 23 African countries to come together in order to plant trees across a 15 kilometres wide stretch south of the Sahara in order to stop the dunes from migrating.
The Dune project would turn 6,000 kilometres of sand into a pan-African sandstone city that supports this Great Green Wall through a localised cementation of desert sand via microbially induced carbonate precipitation (MICP) using the bacteriumBacillus pasteurii, which is capable of producing enough calcite to technically turn sand into sandstone in a very short space of time. The spatial pockets created within the resulting solid rock structure would help retain scarce water and mineral resources, while also serving as programmable spaces – a habitable wall straddling an entire continent, binding villages, people, and countries together.
Dune was presented at TED Global in July 2009. You can see the presentation here: http://www.ted.com/talks/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html
Dune was presented as a chapter in Macro-engineering Seawater in Unique Environments
(2011). Buy the chapter (or the book) here: http://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-14779-1_20

 

Spare 3

This photo is wrong even though it’s is a picture of a doggie. Please replace with a relevant image.

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Maybe a bit of an intro to the topic. Occupy aliquip assumenda tempor retro brunch. Freegan eiusmod leggings ullamco. Ethical sartorial gastropub veniam thundercats, locavore viral. American apparel authentic irony, keytar brunch jean shorts marfa keffiyeh vice dreamcatcher lomo freegan pickled adipisicing direct trade. Ethical semiotics commodo ad authentic mustache. Ex ennui iphone, wayfarers food truck aesthetic williamsburg farm-to-table cillum aliqua marfa proident. Skateboard commodo wes anderson et high life dolor.

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Shoreditch adipisicing voluptate placeat gluten-free vice jean shorts, helvetica banksy odio fingerstache. Flexitarian PBR biodiesel nulla chambray. Tempor next level thundercats, laborum nostrud terry richardson master cleanse keffiyeh vice chillwave craft beer american apparel food truck chambray odd future. Blog echo park mixtape mlkshk in, chillwave aliqua enim pitchfork fixie typewriter messenger bag. 8-bit fugiat pop-up anim, keffiyeh aute kale chips proident cupidatat. Portland cosby sweater banksy williamsburg. Tofu salvia direct trade, cillum accusamus adipisicing DIY sed pop-up.

Next level farm-to-table commodo pariatur. Sunt nostrud butcher elit dolor, esse lomo Austin labore twee sed swag gentrify. Aliqua keffiyeh pop-up, photo booth leggings locavore bicycle rights sunt. Ennui in ethical, pinterest sunt tumblr fap cosby sweater salvia brunch sed odio ullamco 8-bit occupy. Semiotics keytar retro put a bird on it do mumblecore, magna next level cosby sweater post-ironic cliche. Laboris cred banh mi, portland sapiente nulla pork belly before they sold out elit tofu synth. Nostrud beard keffiyeh, thundercats yr non occupy authentic art party scenester narwhal single-origin coffee veniam portland dreamcatcher.

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This photo is wrong even though it’s is a picture of a doggie. Please replace with a relevant image.

Heading 3

Maybe a bit of an intro to the topic. Occupy aliquip assumenda tempor retro brunch. Freegan eiusmod leggings ullamco. Ethical sartorial gastropub veniam thundercats, locavore viral. American apparel authentic irony, keytar brunch jean shorts marfa keffiyeh vice dreamcatcher lomo freegan pickled adipisicing direct trade. Ethical semiotics commodo ad authentic mustache. Ex ennui iphone, wayfarers food truck aesthetic williamsburg farm-to-table cillum aliqua marfa proident. Skateboard commodo wes anderson et high life dolor.

Heading 3

Shoreditch adipisicing voluptate placeat gluten-free vice jean shorts, helvetica banksy odio fingerstache. Flexitarian PBR biodiesel nulla chambray. Tempor next level thundercats, laborum nostrud terry richardson master cleanse keffiyeh vice chillwave craft beer american apparel food truck chambray odd future. Blog echo park mixtape mlkshk in, chillwave aliqua enim pitchfork fixie typewriter messenger bag. 8-bit fugiat pop-up anim, keffiyeh aute kale chips proident cupidatat. Portland cosby sweater banksy williamsburg. Tofu salvia direct trade, cillum accusamus adipisicing DIY sed pop-up.

Next level farm-to-table commodo pariatur. Sunt nostrud butcher elit dolor, esse lomo Austin labore twee sed swag gentrify. Aliqua keffiyeh pop-up, photo booth leggings locavore bicycle rights sunt. Ennui in ethical, pinterest sunt tumblr fap cosby sweater salvia brunch sed odio ullamco 8-bit occupy. Semiotics keytar retro put a bird on it do mumblecore, magna next level cosby sweater post-ironic cliche. Laboris cred banh mi, portland sapiente nulla pork belly before they sold out elit tofu synth. Nostrud beard keffiyeh, thundercats yr non occupy authentic art party scenester narwhal single-origin coffee veniam portland dreamcatcher.

Giving 24HR a New Identity

Ordinary works closely with a number of clients to assist them in building up and making the most of their brands and communication strategies, internally as well as externally. For Swedish creative technology agency 24HR, we’ve carried out a number of projects, ranging from brand definition and visual identity, via strategies for clarifying internal values, through to printed and digital design.

24HR is a Stockholm-based agency specialising in the ideation and production of creative technology solutions for clients including Absolut Vodka, Toyota, and Alfa Laval. In search of a new strategic definition of their way forward at a crucial point in the company’s history, they approached Ordinary to initiate a discussion that took us all the way from establishing a new focus for the business through to the design of a visual language and implementations across a wide range of media.

 

The resulting graphic work is based on heavy contrasts between a fluorescent orange and a deep black, with illustrated characters functioning as visual counterpoints to the stark theme. Humorous design details are sprinkled across the creative work, for which we also built up a photographic identity from scratch, built templates for a range of different presentations, and produced several printed and digital creations, including a much-appreciated campaign that saw a low-tech View-Master camera combine with contemporary 3D rendering and a printed poster, and another one featuring a custom-made Morse code flasher with wich inter-office messages can be transmitted.

 

Project team:

Magnus Larsson

Gonzalo Azores

Alex Kaiser

Jon Bergman (photography)

The New Order: Ionian Landscapes (Kerb Magazine)

For Kerb Magazine #19, we shared our vision of a newfangled role for architecture, and reflected on future bacillithical and crystalline landscapes extending across four different scales, from the incredibly small to the incomprehensibly vast.

 

Man can only do what nature permits him to do. Man does not invent anything. He makes discoveries of principles operative in nature and often finds ways of generalizing those principles and reapplying them in surprise directions. That is called invention. But he does not do anything artificial. Nature has to permit it, and if nature permits it, it is natural. There is naught which is unnatural.1
On 13 January this year, the most venerable science journal in the world, Nature, published an article with the snappy title Robust multicellular computing using genetically encoded NOR gates and chemical ‘wires’. The first sentence reads “Computation underlies the organization of cells into higher-order structures, for example during development or the spatial association of bacteria in a biofilm,” and I dare guess not many Nature-reading architects raised an eyebrow.2
But they should have.
Multicellular computing is about writing software to control the creation of genetic circuits in microbes – “pathways of genes, proteins, and other biomolecules that the cells use to perform a particular task, such as breaking down sugar and turning it into fuel,” to quote an interview with co-author Chistopher Voigt in MIT’s Technology Review.3
Voigt and his colleagues have already managed to create basic circuit components in the bacterium Escherichia coli, and are now “trying to make the cell understand where it is and what it should be doing based on its understanding of the world”. This understanding is aided through giving bacteria the senses of touch, sight, and smell. Euqipped with this, the cells can be programmed on an abstract level like robots and made to perform complex, coordinated tasks.
The implication for architecture is breathtaking. Once the materials we use become biologically programmable, the very nature of the discipline is bound to change irrevocably: while interdisciplinary research has already begun to yield metamaterials (artificial materials engineered to have properties that go beyond those found in nature), the use of computational processes to control cellular compositions essentially gives us the power to precisely configure the built environment, expanding vastly our capacity to use programmable bacteria as building elements.
The most exciting topic within architecture today is biology. This is not surprising: arguably, the most interesting evolution of society today is happening in biology, in particular within the synthetic field of the brilliant professor Voigt, who quickly got snapped up by MIT once his paper was made public. Architecture takes its cues from prevailing scientific and cultural movements, and at the moment, we’re working within a veritable explosion of new biology. This naturally shapes today’s (or at least tomorrow’s) architecture much as the explosion of data and computers shaped architecture throughout the 20th century.
Molecular nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler is one contemporary scientist who probably saw this coming. As early as 1986 he wrote that:
“…now biochemists have gone to work examining the machines that build, repair, and control cells. They have learned to assemble viruses and reprogram bacteria. For the first time in history, people are examining their molecules and unraveling the molecular secrets of life. It seems that molecular engineers will eventually combine improved biochemical knowledge with improved molecular machines, learning to repair damaged tissue structures and so rejuvenate them.”4
25 years later, science has almost caught up with Drexler’s thinking. Voigt’s progress is a major step forward in the process of giving genetically modified microbes a job, but as American inventor, entrepreneur, author, and Drexler supporter Ray Kurzweil has pointed out, utilising full-scale nanoengineering to construct macroscale objects at the molecular scale is “still considered a middle to late 2020s technology”.5
Another of Kurzweil’s observations is that long-term trends are interesting because “an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started”.6 Extrapolated to the field of architecture in the age of synthetic biology, this could be taken as a call to action: maybe it is time to start designing for materials and processes that don’t even exist.
Materials and processes that don’t exist yet, that is. The new generation of synthetic biologists fronted by leading lights such as Voigt is clearly going beyond the examination of molecular secrets described by Drexler. Soon they will be able to control the biological machines that control cells, and when that happens, a whole new realm of architecture opens up, based on “the design rules by which simple logic can be harnessed to produce diverse and complex calculations by rewiring communication between cells”.7 To extend the machine metaphor, Le Corbusier enjoyed talking about the house as a machine for living in.7 Ray Kurzweil named one of his books The Age of Intelligent Machines,8 while leading theorist, author, and founding editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, pronounced the future of machines to be biology.9
If Voigt’s programmable genetic circuit is the latest addition to that trajectory and we learn to create novel materials from computer-controlled synthetic ecosystems, then architects might soon be designing intelligent biological machines for living in. An architect’s technical drawing could contain new sets of instructions: instead of material specifications, perhaps timings for the release of quorum molecules within the bacterially controlled material volume; instead of dimensions, spatial configurations of the bacterial colonies; instead of surface treatments, programmed instructions detailing the precise mapping of where microbe robots will release, emit, repair, cover, coat, glaze, deposit, decompose, etch, polish, grind…
What would the next evolutionary step be? Perhaps architectural machines built from a new sub class of reconfigurable, computational biomaterials that are able to fundamentally change their properties and characteristics beyond traditional notions of self-assembly, in accordance with chemical signal inputs received from a human designer. A spectacular design strategy falling somewhere between in silico and in vivo, sculpting with code in real time on a microbial scale. Such machines, moreover, would double as living, reprogrammable memory storage units. Their performative properties could be programmed to change with incoming data; they could save and play back previous configuration patterns for control purposes; they could even host “internal debates” within their own material structures to inform responses to incoming parameters: Voigt’s NOR gates can be combined to perform any logical operation, and some of his bacterial circuits hack into existing bacterial communication systems called quorum sensing, based on the local density of their population, allowing the cells to increase the quality of the computations performed by “voting” on an output.10
At its most fundamental, architecture is about densifications of matter. The design of our built environment is an accretive process of aggregation and erosion, extending across different scales: cellular accumulations become material articulations that become spatial environments that become built artefacts that become manipulated landscapes that in their most intense states become that greatest of all human inventions: cities.
The construction of completely new organisms lays the groundwork for the construction of completely new materials, and the construction of completely new materials suggests the possibility of new architectures, which can in turn provide a basis for the creation of new kinds of urban realities, alternative and innovative cities, perfect acts of landscape architecture. As biology goes from being a descriptive science to being an engineering science, architecture has the rare chance to go beyond metaphor: instead of Mies van der Rohe’s “exoskeletal” steel frames at the IIT campus in Chicago, Illinois, we can design novel architectural experiences using materials that are programmed to actually be exoskeletal; instead of biomorphic references to living forms, we can design the living forms themselves.
Biotechnology engineers and scientists from MIT, Harvard, and UCSF have created an archive of standardised interchangeable biological parts called BioBricks, sequences of DNA that can perform particular functions, a toolbox filled with biological materials that work as molecules inside living organisms and can be used to engineer biological systems.11 By analogy, today’s ubiquitous use of scripted geometries in architecture, automated modelling through conditional and iterative command executions, could extend to biomaterial manipulations at the material scale, literally injecting new life into coded actions such as arraying, offsetting, trimming, and exploding our designs. Ultimately, the skill of the programmer sets the limits for what is possible within such a system: Voigt has already programmed a strain of Salmonella to make and spin its own spider silk, a substance as strong as, but ten times more elastic than, kevlar.12
So where does this leave the architect? Is she to become a combined designer, synthetic biologist, material scientist, biological engineer, and bio-programmer? Or simply a more consilient architect, capable of directing people from disciplines that have traditionally not been associated with architecture (or which didn’t even exist before)? Will architects reclaim the role of conceptual originator with a license to initiate design investigations beyond the tried and tested? Will we work in close collaboration with synthetic biologists, inorganic chemists, and scientists working in other rising disciplines, or will we allow the emergent technologies to dictate the boundaries of what’s possible without architectural input?
My experience is that scientists tend to largely embrace the consilient attitude, and part of the focus of my practice is to experiment with alternative attitudes that give birth to new ideas about what architecture is and what the role of the architect might become. Increasingly, this work is beginning to be carried out in the laboratory: the quest for a way of turning loose sand into habitable sandstone structures saw me donning a white coat from the biophysics department at UCL, London, while our search for ways of directing crystal growth into built volumes sees me and my colleagues currently spending time peering through safety glasses in the same institution’s inorganic chemistry lab. Our ultimate goal is for this experimentation with different material manipulations to yield architecturally, structurally, formally and phenomenologically logical buildings and landscapes. While we’re not exclusively designing within this paradigm, it is one of the design spaces we keep interrogating for clues about where architecture might go next.
Three landscape projects currently in progress might help to illustrate our attitude towards this field. The most widely published of these is the proposal Dune – Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture, based on a novel process of engineered architectural lithification.
An ever-present element in the material history of architecture, without sand there would be no brick, no concrete, no glass; even wooden structures are sanded down to smoothen their edges. It is also an incredibly renewable material: one billion grains of sand come into existence around the world every second through a cyclic process that sees entire mountain ranges weather and release miniscule splinters of quartz and other finely divided rock and mineral particles. Some of the fragments lithify (from lithos, Greek for ‘stone’ or ‘rock’), into a clastic sedimentary rock, a sandstone. As that sandstone weathers, new grains break free. A typical mountain will be lowered by a few millimetres every year.
That amounts to a lot of sand. Dry areas cover more than one-third of the earth’s land surface, and desertification – “the diminution or destruction of the biological potential of the land” – is a major threat on all continents, affecting more than 100 countires in the world. Some estimates suggest that the livelihoods of 850 million people are at risk, spread out across 35 percent of the Earth’s land surface.
While sand dunes cover only about one fifth of our deserts, those extreme areas are good places to introduce a barrier of greenery in order to halt the shifting sands and stop the dunes from migrating. The idea of a ‘Green Wall for the Sahara’ was first proposed by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005. The initiative originally called for 23 African countries to come together in order to plant trees across a 15 kilometres wide stretch south of the Sahara.
The Dune project would turn 6,000 kilometres of sand into a pan-African sandstone city and support the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and Sahel Initiative through a localised cementation of the desert sand via microbially induced carbonate precipitation (MICP) using the bacterium Bacillus pasteurii, which is capable of producing enough calcite to technically turn sand into sandstone in a very short space of time. The spatial pockets created within the resulting solid, sedimentary rock structure would help retain scarce water and mineral resources, while also serving as habitable and programmable spaces – a habitable wall straddling an entire continent, binding villages, people, and countries together.13
If the use of controlled microbial precipitation is not original enough (while not yet part of the scheme, we acknowledge that programming the bacteria using methods similar to those of professor Voigt could potentially add another dimension to that control mechanism), the idea of working directly within the material volume itself certainly is. This strategy has been imaginatively compared to “a kind of infection of the earth… a vast 3D printer made of bacteria (that) crawls undetectably through the deserts of the world, printing new landscapes into existence over the course of 10,000 years”.14 Using the existing sand dunes as granular readymade structures is arguably a radical approach to the sourcing of local materials: a delicately deviced construction method that adjusts the composition of the dunescape interior just enough to create a structurally valid composition within it.
The Moon Dune project seeks to translate the same idea into a space architecture context, constructing a lunar cratertecture out of a new (thus far theoretical) material, made from bacteria and regolith, which we call bacillith. An alternative to existing proposals for in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU), this method is put forward as an idea for how we might grow and farm building materials in space, an logical continuation of those schemes, referred to as Class III habitats, that are based on the use of in-situ lunar materials. In the past, such plans have mainly focused on techniques such as lunar concrete, sintered or vitreous masonry, and bulk-regolith applications.15
Getting anything into space is an expensive and cumbersome affair; element sizes are restricted by launch constraints, and new limitations are continuously imposed with each step of the process, from structural engineering through to construction management. This reduces the number of valid design proposals: historically, comparatively few schemes have ventured beyond the tried-and-tested core-and-modules typology, the lunar equivalent of the late Kisho Kurokawa’s groundbreaking 1972 Nakagin Capsule Tower, flipped on its side.
A bacillith-based strategy could allow for a much wider range of spatial configurations and articulations, while keeping the distribution costs down as much as possible. Sending vials of propagative microbes to the Moon is arguably a less burdensome method than moving larger volumes of building materials or elements; the initial strains could be made to reproduce when they arrive at their final destination rather than on Earth. Again, once the synthetic biologists become even better at programming bacteria, the microorganisms can be much more precisely deployed, perhaps even controlled (robotically) from Earth. Entire structures could be created inside of the existing lunar craters in a similar way to the sand dunes on this planet. The difference between bacillith and lunar concrete would essentially be that between the renewable bacteria and the permanently depleted cement.
Crystal Lines, finally, explores a different avenue, venturing into inorganic chemistry and investigating the concept of growing both material and binding agent at the same time – taking us one step further towards a truly programmable, extreme minimalist architecture, in which different densities and molecular or cellular arrangements within the same material mass is what differentiates wall from aperture, membrane from surface, and so on. Substrate structures are seeded with crystals and grown within liquid baths. Over and above the shape of the substrate, three control factors incluence the form of the resulting structure: the chemistry of the fluid, the conditions under which it is being solidified, and the ambient pressure it is under. Time becomes an important design factor, like in the construction fantasies of American-Canadian writer William Gibson:
…you could see those towers growing at night. Rooms up top like a honeycomb, and walls just sealing themselves over, one after another (…) Like watching a candle melt, but in reverse.16
While still remaining work in progress, this scheme is the latest of our excursions into the largely unchartered territory that lies at the intersection of architecture and contemporary science. Crystallography, he experimental science of the arrangement of atoms in solids, has been a research topic at least since 1669, when Danish anatomy/geology pioneer Nicolaus Steno (Niels Stensen) noticed that quartz crystals, no matter where they came from or what size they were, always had the same set of characteristic angles between their faces. And yet, I don’t know of a single design experiment that has been aimed at growing crystals into architecture (Roger Hiorn’s prize-winning 2008 installation Seizure was an interior; Tokujin Yoshioka’s Venus chair from the same year a piece of furniture). If the Dune project is an experiment in biological landscape architecture on the continental scale, and Moon Dune a scheme that stretches across the heavens towards an astronomical scale, then Crystal Lines is a return to the human scale, with some designs conceived as individual buildings, although we do also consider ideas based on the seeding of entire Endorheic drainage basins with crystalline structures that could slowly emerge as water is channeled away from the basin walls.
There is a fourth scale that I haven’t touched upon yet, but which we would love to design for: the inner landscape of the human body. In 1967, dedicated medical researcher Larry L. Hench happened to sit next to a US Army colonel on a bus – a chance meeting that led to a discussion about why it should be impossible to create a material that survives exposure to the human body. The colonel had witnessed many amputations in Vietnamn that were due to the body rejecting the parts available to surgeons. The conversation spurred Hench on to discover Bioglass, the first material to form a living bond with the host tissues.17 Architects design bio-medical research centres, but they rarely get involved in the designs that come out of those buildings. It seems natural in a near future of consilient collaboration between the fields of synthetic biology (in which scientists already use bacteria to identify malignant cells within the body and deliver therapeutics where needed) and architecture that architects would start designing for the interior of the body.
We are actively initiating collaborations across all of these scales, from the medical professions through to advanced designs for outer space, from the incredibly small to the incomprehensibly vast. In our aggressively accelerating culture, architects need to reinterpret and broaden the scope of their discipline to exceed the design of the built environment at the human or landscape scale in a terrestrial context. We need to embrace design challenges at the medical nano scale and the astronomical scale of the universe. This calls for a widened approach and an intensified communication and collaboration with experts in fields that have traditionally not been directly associated with architecture.
I have returned on a few occasions in this essay to the idea of consilience, the unity (or literally “jumping together”) of knowledge. Coined by William Whewell in 1840, it is a term that has come to denote the cross-pollination of ideas from different branches of knowledge. All but forgotten by the broader public, the term was resurrected by humanist biologist Edward O. Wilson in his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.18 In one passage, Wilson calls Einstein “the architect of grand unification in physics” and describes him as “Ionian to the core”. He’s referring, of course, to the Ionian school of philosophy, Thales and his successors, who during the 6th century BC abandoned traditional explanations of natural phenomena derived from religions and myths for hypotheses based on ideas gained from personal experience and reflection – initial glimpses of what later became known as the scientific attitude.
Undoubtedly, to some readers, the ideas discussed above will seem greatly exaggerated, the proposed architecture projects closer to mythical fantasies of the 21st century than to scientifically rational Ionian landscapes. And yet I would argue they are perfectly logical responses to a world accelerating exponentially through our contemporary condition of extreme technological and scientific evolution. I’m not a natural scientist, but I too share Wilson’s urge to dream about territories for which there are no maps:
“I admit that the confidence of natural scientists often seems overweening. Science offers the boldest metaphysics of the age. It is a thoroughly human construct, driven by the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow come clearer and we wil grasp the true strangeness of the universe. And the strangeness will all prove to be connected and make sense.”19
Hopefully, one day, the strangeness above will connect and begin to make sense.
Magnus Larsson
Get the full-text version here: http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=844473132132231;res=IELHSS

Moon Dune – Bacillithic Cratertecture

The potential for microbial life to adapt and evolve in environments beyond this planet is the starting point for our proposal to create a new material that would facilitate the future colonisation of the Moon. Working Earth bacteria straight into the lunar regolith might be one in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) strategy.

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In the narrative world, there is a long and proud history of such fictional materials, from the super-hard adamant (the material that the fictitious flying island is made of in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which takes on magnetic properties allowing its hovering ability), via Isaac Asimov’s invention thiotimoline, a fabricated compound with chemical bonds that project back to the past and into the future, through to the balthorium used in the Russians’ doomsday device in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove.
Science is also no stranger to imagined materials: the success of Russian chemistry professor  Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev’s periodic table in 1869 (as opposed to that published independently by Julius Lothar Meyer the following year) came partly from his leaving gaps in the table for corresponding elements that had not yet been discovered. In the years following Mendeleev’s publication, the gaps were filled as chemists discovered more chemical elements. While the last naturally occurring element to be discovered was francium in 1939, the periodic table has since grown with the addition of synthetic and transuranic elements.
This chapter describes a process whereby lunar architecture would be made from the speculative material bacillith, a combination of terrestrial bacteria and the Moon’s regolith. The resulting ISRU structure would require launching less rockets into space compared to similar proposals that have been made in the past.
Buy the chapter (or the book) here: http://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-27969-0_28

 

Dune Book

This photo is wrong even though it’s is a picture of a doggie. Please replace with a relevant image.

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Maybe a bit of an intro to the topic. Occupy aliquip assumenda tempor retro brunch. Freegan eiusmod leggings ullamco. Ethical sartorial gastropub veniam thundercats, locavore viral. American apparel authentic irony, keytar brunch jean shorts marfa keffiyeh vice dreamcatcher lomo freegan pickled adipisicing direct trade. Ethical semiotics commodo ad authentic mustache. Ex ennui iphone, wayfarers food truck aesthetic williamsburg farm-to-table cillum aliqua marfa proident. Skateboard commodo wes anderson et high life dolor.

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Shoreditch adipisicing voluptate placeat gluten-free vice jean shorts, helvetica banksy odio fingerstache. Flexitarian PBR biodiesel nulla chambray. Tempor next level thundercats, laborum nostrud terry richardson master cleanse keffiyeh vice chillwave craft beer american apparel food truck chambray odd future. Blog echo park mixtape mlkshk in, chillwave aliqua enim pitchfork fixie typewriter messenger bag. 8-bit fugiat pop-up anim, keffiyeh aute kale chips proident cupidatat. Portland cosby sweater banksy williamsburg. Tofu salvia direct trade, cillum accusamus adipisicing DIY sed pop-up.

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Moon Dune – Bacillithic Cratertecture

 The potential for microbial life to adapt and evolve in environments beyond this planet is the starting point for our proposal to create a new material that would facilitate the future colonisation of the Moon. Working Earth bacteria straight into the lunar regolith might be one in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) strategy.

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In the narrative world, there is a long and proud history of such fictional materials, from the super-hard adamant (the material that the fictitious flying island is made of in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which takes on magnetic properties allowing its hovering ability), via Isaac Asimov’s invention thiotimoline, a fabricated compound with chemical bonds that project back to the past and into the future, through to the balthorium used in the Russians’ doomsday device in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr Strangelove.
Science is also no stranger to imagined materials: the success of Russian chemistry professor  Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev’s periodic table in 1869 (as opposed to that published independently by Julius Lothar Meyer the following year) came partly from his leaving gaps in the table for corresponding elements that had not yet been discovered. In the years following Mendeleev’s publication, the gaps were filled as chemists discovered more chemical elements. While the last naturally occurring element to be discovered was francium in 1939, the periodic table has since grown with the addition of synthetic and transuranic elements.
This chapter describes a process whereby lunar architecture would be made from the speculative material bacillith, a combination of terrestrial bacteria and the Moon’s regolith. The resulting ISRU structure would require launching less rockets into space compared to similar proposals that have been made in the past.
Buy the chapter (or the book) here: http://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-27969-0_28

Dune – Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture

A single grain of sand is almost nothing: a splinter of rock, a miniscule fragment of a geological formation, the residue of a microcosmic event. Myriad grains together, however, become almost everything: mesmerising landscapes, vast deserts, a fluid material capable of being transformed into not just solid structures but a novel desert architecture.

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In aggregates of sand, interlocking angular quartz grains, we find fascinating forms and emergent patterns; possibilities, potentials, substance. In short, we find a constant unfolding of interactive opportunities – a material logic that we might use to sculpt buildings out of the desert.

Without sand there would be no brick, no concrete, no glass. Even wooden structures are sanded down to smoothen their edges. Sand is an incredibly renewable material: one billion grains of sand come into existence around the world every second through a cyclic process that sees entire mountain ranges weather and release miniscule splinters. Some of those fragments lithify (from lithos, Greek for »stone« or »rock«), into a clastic sedimentary rock, a sandstone. As that sandstone weathers, new grains break free. A typical mountain will be lowered by a few millimetres every year.
That amounts to a lot of sand. Dry areas cover more than one-third of the earth’s land surface, and desertification – »the diminution or destruction of the biological potential of the land« – is a major threat on all continents, affecting more than 100 countires in the world. Some estimates suggest that the livelihoods of 850 million people are at risk, spread out across 35 percent of the Earth’s land surface.
The idea of introduce a barrier of greenery in order to halt the shifting sands, building a »Green Wall for the Sahara,« was first proposed by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005. The initiative originally called for 23 African countries to come together in order to plant trees across a 15 kilometres wide stretch south of the Sahara in order to stop the dunes from migrating.
The Dune project would turn 6,000 kilometres of sand into a pan-African sandstone city that supports this Great Green Wall through a localised cementation of desert sand via microbially induced carbonate precipitation (MICP) using the bacteriumBacillus pasteurii, which is capable of producing enough calcite to technically turn sand into sandstone in a very short space of time. The spatial pockets created within the resulting solid rock structure would help retain scarce water and mineral resources, while also serving as programmable spaces – a habitable wall straddling an entire continent, binding villages, people, and countries together.
Dune was presented at TED Global in July 2009. You can see the presentation here: http://www.ted.com/talks/magnus_larsson_turning_dunes_into_architecture.html
Dune was presented as a chapter in Macro-engineering Seawater in Unique Environments
(2011). Buy the chapter (or the book) here: http://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-14779-1_20

 

Perch – Low-Density Timber Skyscraper

Perch is our initial investigation of the low density concept, with vertical volumes propping up horizontal units, leaving a large (10m x 10m) void space as a quadrangle running the entire height of the building. Furthermore, it challenges its initial boundary condition through a series of rotated bridges that cross through this open courtyard, stitching their way from one side of the building to the next, floating inside of the 100m2 vertical piazza.

The bridges that shoot through this vertical piazza are an example of what we call semi-public spaces, that is, spatial volumes programmed to be shared by the inhabitants of the building: places to get together for a game of chess or a glass of wine, to tend to a collective garden, watch a film, or maybe (if you work from home) have a business meeting.

This combination of two typologies – the t scraper configuration and the habitable bridge, is perhaps not entirely dissimilar to one of us architect Steven Holl’s projects, the Gymnasium-Bridge in South Bronx, New York (1977). This project saw an enclosed pedestrian bridge shoot from the South Bronx to the park on Randall’s Island, condensing, as the architect puts it in his 1989 book Anchoring, »the activities of meeting, physical recreation, and work into one structure«.

This hybrid between levels of stacked modules and habitable bridges generate interest in what could have become a slightly anonymous (if still fairly unconventional) elevation. The living units are intertwined, forming snake-like patterns reminiscent of a Chinese Puzzle. This leads to scenarios in which an inhabitant will occupy a volume that spans some 15 or even 20 metres into the air, connected to two communal bridges that add a further potential 10 metres or so. While the living units at the smaller end of the spectrum – we have gone to great lengths to ensure we cater to residents of different ages and economic circumstances – might be fairly small in terms of square meterage, the floor-to-ceiling height and expansive feeling of living with the quadrangular void on one side and the city on the other ends up creating a great foundation for a very high living quality. Looking out the window of her flat on the 17th floor, a young student would probably be rather pleased with her accommodation.

Perch also features a timber lattice that runs in between its solid panels. At times, this grid carries sheets of glass, at times it becomes a bookshelf, at times it holds lighting, at times it becomes a trellis for plants to grow on, at times it supports the servicing of the building.

Low-Density Living to a T

LOG is an ongoing project carried out in collaboration with Professor Ulf Arne Girhammar at the Luleå University of Technology. The objective is to propose alternative future scenarios for the timber skyscraper typology.
Based on an exhaustive investigation of the possibilities of wood in large-scale architecture, the t Scraper typology is the novel organisational principle behind three timber skyscrapers – Perch, Porous, and Punch. Simple t modules are stacked in different ways to create configurations that break with the ”rational” tradition of stacking envelope-sized floor plates on top of each other.
The resulting buildings challenge predominant notions of the optimisation of space – ther than creating high-density architecture, the project argues the case for low-density buildings, in which new ways of living can be explored. The resulting three skyscrapers are all essays in low-density living.
The structural and proportional organisation of the t scraper strikes us as particularly elegant: a horisontal volume at a 1:4 ratio is lightly but resolutely lifted off the ground by two cubic units, only to in turn prop up another horisontal unit, which is given secondary support by its own column of three equilateral boxes, repeating the 1:4 relationship between the elements. This ingenious typology pushes the building into the sky seemingly without effort: a simple choreography of stacked boxes.

 

 

 

Go to Architecture

WE’D LIKE THIS POP UP TO NOT HAPPEN, AND JUST SLIDE STRAIGHT TO THE ARCHITECTURE SECTION.

Camera – Non clickable

Brochure 2

Sweet looking brochure. black and red looks good.

Here’s some other brochures that are pretty badass.

this is a nice picture of a brochure. it makes me happy.

Want to see more design. Click Here

 

Giving 24HR a New Identity

Ordinary works closely with a number of clients to assist them in building up and making the most of their brands and communication strategies, internally as well as externally. For Swedish creative technology agency 24HR, we’ve carried out a number of projects, ranging from brand definition and visual identity, via strategies for clarifying internal values, through to printed and digital design.

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24HR is a Stockholm-based agency specialising in the ideation and production of creative technology solutions for clients including Absolut Vodka, Toyota, and Alfa Laval. In search of a new strategic definition of their way forward at a crucial point in the company’s history, they approached Ordinary to initiate a discussion that took us all the way from establishing a new focus for the business through to the design of a visual language and implementations across a wide range of media.

 

The resulting graphic work is based on heavy contrasts between a fluorescent orange and a deep black, with illustrated characters functioning as visual counterpoints to the stark theme. Humorous design details are sprinkled across the creative work, for which we also built up a photographic identity from scratch, built templates for a range of different presentations, and produced several printed and digital creations, including a much-appreciated campaign that saw a low-tech View-Master camera combine with contemporary 3D rendering and a printed poster, and another one featuring a custom-made Morse code flasher with wich inter-office messages can be transmitted.

 

Project team:

Magnus Larsson

Gonzalo Azores

Alex Kaiser

Jon Bergman (photography)

Dune 01

This might have something to do with dunes… but I’m not quite sure

this is a nice picture of sand. it makes me happy.

Sand is pretty cool. Sorry for the pun

 

Magnus Larsson

Magnus Larsson

Director

BA (Hons), AA Dip, RIBA II

London-based Swedish architect Magnus Larsson started out in journalism and advertising. As a writer, he has been published in magazines including Frame, Another Magazine, Bon International, Port Magazine, and The Wire. As a copywriter, he’s contributed texts for brands such as Apple, Absolut Vodka, Sony Ericsson, Electrolux, and Virgin.

Following a BA (hons) in Oxford, he moved on to the Architectural Association, where he designed with surface equations in Diploma Unit 5 under the tutelage of George Legendre. In Diploma Unit 16 he proposed Dune, the 6,000km long habitable anti-desertification wall made of biologically solidified bacterial sandstone that won international acclaim but was slated by the end-of-year AA jury. He then presented a novel take on iconicity in Diploma Unit 9 through the implementation of a 180m tall, loadbearing brick skyscraper hotel in Manhattan, based on the combination of the corner as spatial generator and the trademark heterogenous materiality inherent within many of his designs.

In July 2009, Larsson took to the stage at TED Global in Oxford. In front of 700 people he gave a twelve-minute talk that has to date been viewed by some 350,000 people on the TED website alone, and translated into 25 languages. The presentation led to a fair bit of attention from a wide range of publications spanning from Wired UK via Slashdot to American Vogue. Larsson now lectures extensively all over the world. In 2011, he co-founded Ordinary Ltd with long-time collaborator Alex Kaiser.

Thidaa Test

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Small caps that explains the project really briefly

Title of text

Thidaa is AWESOME

 

Alex Kaiser

Alex Kaiser

Director

BA (Hons), AA Dip, RIBA II

London-based Irish architect Alex Kaiser teaches the exceptionally popular intermediate Media Studies course, Painting Architecture, at the Architectural Association in London, where he is also a first-year studio tutor.  

Following a BA (hons) in Oxford, he moved on to the Architectural Association, where he enjoyed a year in Shin Egashira’s Dip 11 unit, followed by a year in Oliver Domeisen’s Dip 10 unit, for which he was nominated for the annual honours award. 

Kaiser has given various drawing and digital painting workshops for architecture units both at the Architectural Association and other universities, including, for instance, the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. He is also a tutor with the Drawing at Work group, for which he has given courses to professional architects at offices including RSPH, ORMS, AHMM, Penoyre, and Prasad. 

Having worked with design and visualisation for Moxon Architects, Farostudio, and the Richard Rogers Partnership, he co-founded Ordinary Ltd with Magnus Larsson in 2011. Kaiser has also been a concept design contractor with advertising agency LBi, as well as having had a wide range of visualisation and drawing/painting commissions from the design industry.

Kaiser has been bequested several awards and grants, including prizes at Oxford for the most comprehensive design portfolio and the highest design mark, a nomination for the RIBA Bronze Medal, first prize in the Gnomon Workshop monthly painting competition, and the William Glover Bequest at the Architectural Association.

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Contact Us

Are you interested in commissioning a building or an installation? Would you like to know more about our work at the intersection of architecture and synthetic biology? Are you interested in having Ordinary lecture at your event, contribute to your magazine or scientific publication, or take part in your exhibition? Please drop us a line using the details below.

Please direct new business inquiries to: magnus@anordinarywebsite.com

Please direct all press inquiries to: press@anordinarywebsite.com

Please direct all job-seeking inquiries to: jobs@anordinarywebsite.com

Please direct all other inquiries to: enquiries@anordinarywebsite.com

 

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Ordinary Ltd

Cell studios

Grosvenor Works

Grosvenor Way

Mount Pleasant Hill

London E5 9NE

Ordinary Playlist: February 2013 (button)

Ordinary Playlist: February 2013
Each month, we pick our favourite tunes from the playlist that runs in the background as we toil away in the Ordinary workshop. This then becomes the official soundtrack of our lives for that particular month. Here are the songs that have been rocking our world lately.
Hot Chip – Look at Where We Are (from In Our Heads, 2012)
Tessellate – Alt-J (from An Awesome Wave, 2012)
David Shrigley – Don’ts (from Late Night Tales: Four Tet (Remastered), 2012)
Cyclones – See If I Float (from The Music Sounds Better With Huw, 2009)
Photek – KJZ (from Modus Operandi, 1997)
Ben Folds & Rufus Wainwright – Careless Whisper (from The Best Imitation of Myself – A Retrospective, 2011)
General Fiasco – Don’t You Ever (from Don’t You Ever EP, 2012)
LCD Soundsystem – Losing My Edge (from LCD Soundsystem, 2005)
Ben Folds Five – On Being Frank (from The Sound of the Life of the Mind, 2012)
The Killers – Runaways (from Battle Born, 2012)
Artur Rubinstein – Frederic Chopin, Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23 (from Chopin Piano Works, 2011)
Rodriguez – I Wonder (Searching for Sugar Man, 2012)

Our Cup of Coffee

Some biologists hold that lukewarm coffee tastes bad because cavemen didn’t have refrigerators. Be that as it may, very few designs would come out of the Ordinary office if it wasn’t for that favourite crystalline xanthine alkaloid of ours, C8H10N4O2.

When you next swing by the Ordinary workshop, you’re likely to be offered a cup of coffee. And this is your behind-the-scenes guide to how it will be made:
1. Have a cup of coffee. If you’re anything like us, you’re going to need a cup coursing through your veins before you get going.
2. Get amazing beans. Buy in small quantities and aim to consume within one month. We currently like Kebel Dumerso, an Ethiopian coffee brought to London by Monmouth Coffee.
3. Boil the kettle and weigh out 75g of beans per litre of water.
4. Grind the beans (go with a coarse grind for a cafetière).
5. Let the boiled water rest for a while. Warm the cafetière carafe with hot water and discard.
6. Add the ground coffee and pour in about a third of the water. Leave for 30 seconds. Stir the grinds and add the remaining water. Leave for a further 4 minutes while you warm your cups with hot water.
7. When the time is up, stir once and scoop the grinds off the top. Plunge, serve and enjoy.

Our Cup of Tea

A cup of coffee is our cup of tea really, but every once in a while, varietas delectat – below, you’ll find the secret recipy for how we take our cuppa. After all, in Britain a staggering 165 million cups of tea are drunk each day. That equals 60.2 billion a year. Dizzy yet?

At Ordinary, we have a certain penchant for the scientific. And so, we’ve followed rather closely the academic debate on how to make the perfect cup of tea. The key to the best-tasting brew, apparently, is to let it sit for six minutes before drinking. By then it has cooled down to 60°C, which is the optimum temperature for releasing the flavours.
This according to a team at the University of Northumbria’s School of Life Sciences, which in 2011 spent a cool 180 hours of testing and a panel of volunteers that consumed 285 cups of tea in the laboratory to come up with an equation for the ideal cup of tea.
Here’s how to do it:
1. In a mug, add 200ml of freshly boiled water to one tea bag.
2. Allow the tea bag to brew for exactly 2 minutes.
3. Remove the tea bag.
4. Add 10ml of milk (to reduce notes of wood, grass, lemon, rose, and geranium with toffee and vanilla).
5. Wait another 6 minutes before consumption for the tea to reach its optimum temperature of 60°C.
Note to future Ordinary interns: 98% of the British population take their tea with milk. Magnus Larsson does not.