Over the last decade or so, two long-standing avenues of exploration in architecture have converged: technomorphism and biophilia. The belief that designers should not just learn from and express the forms nature provides, but should in fact let the entire development of their designs extend and mimic how natural forms blossom, is the result of our increasing understanding of the intricacies of nature at many scales. It is also a reaction to our destruction of it. On the technological side, we have similarly moved beyond a desire to make buildings that look like and work as machines. Instead, we want them to develop much in the way that a collection of tools, performing tasks independently, can together create a complex entity. Designers want to mimic how such processes occur with minimal—if any—human intervention.
In my opinion, no firm working today is better at pushing this convergence of natural and technological processes into semi-automatic (but still very “signature”) designs than Terreform ONE. The book Design with Life: Biotech Architecture and Resilient Cities (Actar, 2020), authored by the firm's cofounders Mitchell Joachim, Assoc. AIA, and Maria Aiolova, Assoc. AIA, collects their projects from the last two decades and shows the full breadth—but also the limitations—of that work.
The strengths of Terreform ONE’s designs are evident in the 500-page tome. The book features a bestiary of mechanical animals, including octopi at an urban scale, the tentacles of which intertwine with the entire borough of Brooklyn to form a combination of roads and buildings, as well as sea anemones that surround Manhattan—translucent islands that serve as wetlands and a buffer against the rising seas of climate change. The firm’s projects dip down in scale to include sinuous vines that creep up buildings as habitats for butterflies, or coalesce into self-sustaining skyscrapers. They include collections of beehives that form apian metropolises, armadillo-like sheds that support insect life, and blobs that provide shelters for humans. The firm has also designed towers of trash and favelas on Wall Street, spotlighting Manhattan’s unsustainable environmental and financial practices. The sheer number of projects this relatively young design firm has produced, as well as their variety, is astonishing. It is a testament to the possibilities of encouraging, rather than suppressing, the fecundity of the natural world through architecture.
Which is also part of the book’s limitation: despite numerous short essays and interviews, it never develops an argument beyond its fairly straightforward premise, which Joachim spells out in the opening pages: “Architectural designers need to work with nature. The mixture of hi-tech tuning and formalistic liberties that are available to designers today can be significantly developed only through critical foundational principles in each scheme; a grounding which stresses design to pursue consequence by probing the greater and obscured natural environments of every discrete project.” Even here, though, the thinking becomes a bit muddled. What does it mean for something to be “significantly developed”? What, exactly, are the “critical foundational principles”? How have natural environments become “obscured”? The terms demand a much more careful study than the book provides.
That is true both in terms of the theory itself and its history, which reaches back not only to the ideas developed in the 19th century by John Ruskin, Owen Jones, and Gottfried Semper, to name but three influential thinkers, but also to the history of biology, epistemology (particularly relevant given current debates about consciousness and its chemical or social nature), biology, chemistry, and aesthetics. To cite more recent influences, Joachim’s projects build on the groundbreaking work of Lars Spuybroek, Greg Lynn’s early analyses of splines and blobs, and Patrik Schumacher’s notion of parametricism.
I do not mean to imply that Joachim and his colleagues are not original designers or thinkers. The sheer breadth of the firm’s projects, and the startling beauty of images and forms (the spaces, as far as I can tell, aren’t quite as dazzling) attest to the power of the work. In this sense, Joachim is perhaps a biomorphic antipode to Bjarke Ingels, who is the subject of a few digs in the book. Joachim is a synthesizer, a form-giver, a master of grand projects whose sweep draws us forward into a utopian vision of a world in which humans, other sentient beings, and the biotopes they inhabit have developed into new forms.
These forms also have precedents. Joachim acknowledges the British group that published Archigram as his main source of inspiration. However, it seems to me that his forms come directly out of what I would call the “stringy urbanism” that Lynn, Schumacher, Zaha Hadid, and Wolf Prix, Hon. FAIA, developed at the University for the Applied Arts in Vienna during the aughts. Related to both the computational and the visualization tools that became available to architects during that period, it is an urbanism that consists of a bestiary of snakes, blobs, bullnoses, amoebas, and sea anemones that flourish today on desktops around the world, even if few of those designs have ever come to inhabit what some of us think of as the “real” world.
One area where Terreform ONE has not only done this kind of architecture better than almost anyone (and by that I mean made more beautiful, elegant, evocative, and even believable forms), but has pushed its implications and importance further, is in seeing the work as habitats rather than as forms. The firm aspires to create “artificial climates,” not just conditioned spaces. They understand the designs as not just intended for human beings, but for all beings. The beehives and butterfly habitats, the incubators not for new tech businesses but for plants and animals, and the artificial biotopes all take concrete steps to move architecture beyond creating defensive structures for human beings as they lay waste to the landscapes outside their cocoons, and into the realm of designing for a better planet.
Design with Life is a book that made me smile and hope, that made me marvel at the inventiveness of the forms and feel seduced by a biophilic and technomorphic Garden of Eden rising out of the ruins of our soon-to-be-drowned cities. I do not know enough science to be able to judge whether any of this will work, but if architecture is going to help save our planet, I hope it does so with forms as beautiful as those Joachim and Terreform ONE create.
Aaron Betsky is a regularly featured columnist whose views and conclusions are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine nor of the American Institute of Architects.
