25 June – 1 July 2012

An exhibition exploring biomimicry and bio-inspiration in architecture, through materials and installations that grow, decompose, sense and respond to their surroundings.

Living Space is an exhibition showcasing materials and installations that grow, decompose, sense and respond to their surroundings. Through the examination of biomimicry and bio-inspiration in architecture this project celebrates the work of contemporary architects and designers, and the methodology and materials used to explore their ideas.
Curated by CADA (Curating Architecture Design Art) in partnership with So Far, The Future gallery, Living Space includes materials, processes and projects that reflect upon the future of architecture, and its relationship to the environment.

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Living Architecture /
Silviya Ilieva /
2011

Ilieva’s design study focuses on an alternative solution to create a space changing architectural environment. Taking the movement and flight of butterflies as its inspiration, the project translates patterns of behaviour derived from nature into a mechanical structure. The model includes coded behaviour based on the proximity of human presence and the relation of each simulated creature to its neighbours. These biologically inspired devices form a network of relationships and processes that, in turn, form an organised responsive environment. When these flight patterns are removed from their original context and the organism’s biological anatomy is replaced by sensors and digitally controlled mechanical servers, a new artificial life form emerges with its own set of behaviours. The focus is on transformation and adaptation – a setting with responsive actions and living technologies at primitive level that could be developed and used for creating a self-sufficient architectural system in the future.

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LumenBios /
BornAnIdea /
2011

LumenBios investigates the changes, encouraged by natural conditions that occur in materials over time and space. Primarily focusing on fungal growth, and its bioluminescent properties, the project aims to replace the sterile and standardised production of a table top and question how the materiality changes through variable seasonal conditions. The introduction of active growth and the spread of the bioluminescent mycelium makes the material into a living organism itself by working its way through the shredded wood. The bacteria changes the material over time as it carves, layerers, decomposes and re-synthesises the wood. BornAnIdea’s work explores a wider context by looking beyond the table itself and uses their time-based material exploration to consider how more sustainable processes or self-healing building materials can be utilised within a contemporary urban context. This material study helps formulate and critically engage with developments in material culture and accelerated changes in product design as well as architectural practise.

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Tensegritic-Intelligent Canopy /
sharisharishari /
2010

As part of a wider research context into relationships between people and architecture, Tensegritic-Intelligent Canopy introduces a responsive strategy for intelligent architecture. The model‘s multi-scaled system responds and communicates directly with factors, such as humans and weather conditions. Through two sets of information, software and hardware, the programmed rules change throughout the architectural model‘s interaction with various factors. Each individual component within the system has the ability to compute data and, as a result, can change its physical behaviour independent of others in the complete system. The model integrates numerous complicated computers dedicated to sensing, calculating and actuating, with functions such as input, evaluation, output. This produces a completely interactive interface between machine and human. sharisharishari uses a high level of artificial intelligence to highlight the potential interaction between humans and their architectural environments in the future.

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This Apple Tastes Like Our Living Room Used To Smell /
Alex Schweder La /
2007–present

Alex Schweder La works with architecture and performance art to complicate the distinction between occupying subjects and occupied objects. Due to forces such as politics, entropy, and shifts in human desire, we live in buildings that are in a constant state of change. Often, though, these changes occur too slowly for us to notice and buildings are thus thought of as stable. Schweder La’s work speeds the time based reality of buildings up to something we can perceive – a performance. The project presented here involves taking something that we conventionally understand as an object and rethinking it as a process. In this case, a watercolour painting on a white wall depicting mould, a substance that can adversely affect both occupying bodies and occupied space. In this moment of horror we oddly are more intimate with the object we occupy.

This work is on loan from the collection of Bill and Ruth True.