Machinic architectural ecologies

Abstract

In 1995 Jennifer Bloomer remarked that the new wave of digital architecture was a ‘subjugation of matter by form’ – an implicit rejection of ‘that dirty place, the matter of mater’. Where architecture once emerged from the material mess of its site, twenty years ago the new frontier of architectural form-making looked clean, light and virtual. Matter was left in the garden. In the intervening years, digital technologies have advanced to engage more closely with material systems. The growing body of experimental designs that enlist non-human biological and technological actants as co-creators with taglines like ‘protocellular architecture’, ‘material ecologies’ and ‘hylozoic grounds’ will be ..