A Verdant Future: Bioagency in the Material Realm

By Katie MacDonald

An Ecological Imperative

In December 2017, the Thomas Fire tore through southern California - the largest fire in state history, but a record that was surpassed a mere seven months later. Weeks after the fire, my parents, who were spared from the flames but lived on the shallow slope between the burnt hills and the ocean, received a warning about coming rain and the danger of flooding in their neighborhood. Weary from the previous month of evacuations, they reluctantly packed a few items and the family dog into the car and went to stay at my grandparents’ home. That night, torrential rains fell on scorched slopes. The charred earth, newly void of vegetation, gave way and triggered a debris flow that overwhelmed the community and took twenty-three lives. The next day, as my parents were barred from entering their neighborhood due to ongoing rescue operations, I discovered helicopter footage on Twitter of our street corner — iconic trees stood tall around an empty brown patch of ground where their house once stood. The news I shared fell on incredulous ears.

Together with the recent catastrophic bushfires in Australia, the fires in California are heralds of the Pyrocene — a term coined by environmental historian Stephen Pyne in 2015 — a new age of extreme flame on an unforeseen scale. Caught in an alien landscape of mud, the event made visceral for me a reality that so many have already faced: climate change is here, buildings are vulnerable, and humanity’s failure to confront our own global impact has dire implications for our immediate future. Fire produces some of the most media-worthy images of climate change, but there are countless other ways in which ecological damage does and will manifest.

“...there is another material realm for architecture, assembled not from standardized parts purchased at Home Depot, but made of intelligent natural systems that stood long before we arrived and will stand long after we are gone.”

Months later, I surveyed the landscape. Over ten feet below me was the buried slab of a home I had often visited. Surrounding me, the stucco houses that lined the streets were scattered like matchsticks, their monolithic veneers having betrayed their ubiquitous balloon-frame construction. Fresh boulders triple my height dotted the neighborhood.

As a designer, I returned home changed. I thought of the eucalyptus trees, still standing but with grotesque tangles of wood and steel wrapped around trunks stripped by the force of the debris; the height of scarring serving as the only record to calculate the speed of the flow. I realized that there is another material realm for architecture, assembled not from standardized parts purchased at Home Depot, but made of intelligent natural systems that stood long before we arrived and will stand long after we are gone.

Branching Inventory (By Tyler Sanford and Kevin Saslawsky), University of Tennessee, courtesy After Architecture.

Invasive Rematerialization, (By Casey Hall, Daniela Neal, and Sarah Wheeler), University of Tennessee, courtesy After Architecture.

A Manufactured World

Epitomized by Marc-Antoine Laugier’s Primitive Hut, architects have often been concerned, in some way or another, with the relationship of built form to grown form. While an interest in literal grown form has received a few moments of renaissance throughout the ages (Baroque, Rococo, and Secessionist buildings literally depicted grown form), modernism largely shifted to a focus on the dominance of architecture over nature.

The First Industrial Revolution introduced standardization and mass-produced materials, taming the natural world. Later came plywood sheets, oriented strand board, laminated veneer lumber, cross-laminated timber, and other engineered wood products that take natural materials, break them down into small fragments, and reassemble them into elements that perform uniformly and predictably. Removing the inherent variation of natural materials enables codification and streamlines the production of buildings. However, immense amounts of energy go into the production of what are still essentially raw materials, large amounts of waste are produced, and the inherently structural diagram of the grown material is lost. These materials effectively trade greater embodied energy and waste for ease of construction on site.

“If the early aughts saw the trending of LEED certification, solar panels, and efficient building fixtures and equipment, the new decade hastens greater action: ecological engagement, carbon sequestration, and a biomaterial revolution.”

Home Grown, courtesy of After Architecture

Today, a renewed interest in how construction convention defines architecture is taking shape in architecture exhibitions and galleries. Paul Anderson and Paul Preissner’s forthcoming Venice Biennale exhibition American Framing examines the body of construction knowledge developed by European immigrants and subsequent advent of dimensional lumber. Recent installations by Anna Neimark and Michelle Chang make use of structural insulated panels (SIPs) and drywall, respectively; each exaggerate construction industry standards and exploit their peculiarities for spatial effects.

Sticks and Stones, courtesy of After Architecture

The continuity of traditional material streams is under question due to finite resources, changing climates, and greater awareness about material life cycles and their effects. The Anthropocene is gaining traction as a subdivision of geologic time that physically registers the influence of human behavior on Earth's atmosphere (a period which aligns with both the growth and scale of post-WWII human action that accelerated through the Atomic Age and continues today), and overlaps with the Homogenocene, characterized by diminishing biodiversity as ecosystems around the world become increasingly homogenized due to urban development, industrial agriculture, natural resource extraction, pollution, invasive species, and other factors. Increasing awareness that construction contributes the lionshare of global carbon emissions propels architects to reimagine the materials and processes that have contributed to the issues at hand. Biomaterial research has grown out of academy research into industry investment with Autodesk’s 2014 acquisition of biomaterial-focused design practice The Living, foreshadowing a material revolution in which the engineering and raising of plants, bacteria, fungi, algae, and other organisms might become mainstream. Even famed urbanist Rem Koolhaas has shifted focus from cities to the agrarian; upending the expectations of an art-seeking public, his Guggenheim exhibition Countryside, The Future, studies the emerging technologies, material cultures, and ecological practices of the rural world.

Less Green, More Grown

If the early aughts saw the trending of LEED certification, solar panels, and efficient building fixtures and equipment, the new decade hastens greater action: ecological engagement, carbon sequestration, and a biomaterial revolution.

There exist many natural materials that have been effectively developed through the iterative process of evolution for millennia but have thus far resisted industrialization and its never-ending quest toward uniformity and standardization. Bamboo and other rapidly growing grasses, fibrous vines, and tree species with irregular geometries have structural and sustainable benefits that are untapped in widespread construction in the developed world. Plant materials in their naturally occurring state are already highly intelligent and optimized for particular conditions: a close look at the cross section of a bamboo pole shows the fiber density greatly increasing toward the perimeter of the pole where the bending force is greatest - an optimized structural diagram for a cylindrical column.

Bamboo CNC (Jonas Hauptman, Katie MacDonald, and Kyle Schumann), courtesy Will Warasila

The embodied intelligence of the biological has been historically co-opted by artists and designers: Land Art identifies and reveals ordering systems within nature, while the Digital Turn made the complexity of biological intelligence more approachable, leading to biomorphic and biomimetic architectures. If biomimicry models design on biological entities and processes, and morphology draws on the forms of living organisms, I am interested in how technology might instrumentalize the embodied intelligence of biological material—what I’ll call bioagency.

Bioagency is borne from nature but enabled by technology, aimed not at creating high performance materials but at the intelligent utilization of natural, rapidly renewable ones. New technological advances (3D scanning and imaging, tomography, thermography, evolutionary solvers, parametric modeling, etc.) create immense opportunity for the intelligent and more efficient use of such materials, leveraging data and feedback to help reconcile the intentions of the designer with the irregularity of natural materials and processes. Advanced imaging technologies have long been used in the forestry industry but have yet to bridge the gap between the production of building components and the design of architecture.

My work is targeted at advancing the possibilities of biomaterials. For example, though bamboo is a rapidly renewable, low-carbon, high strength building material, its implementation is limited due to the manual labor required to work with its irregular geometry as well as associations with the informal architectures of tiki bar kitsch and construction scaffolding. Working with an interdisciplinary team of faculty including Virginia Tech’s Jonas Hauptman, Daniel Hindman, Alexander Niemiera, and Tom Hammett, and University of Tennessee’s Kyle Schumann, our approach is to leverage the irregular form of the bamboo rather than see it as a barrier. We are creating a holistic system that uses photographic image analysis to create a digital model of each pole, analyze an inventory of digitized poles against a parametric model of required parts, adapt an assembly to the available material, and mill poles using a custom 4-axis CNC mill, minimizing part reduction. In another project, we are developing a structural panel of cross-laminated bamboo akin to cross-laminated timber, but with the added benefits of faster growth and a higher strength-to-weight ratio than wood. Since it is already typical for CLT panels to be custom built for each job, the project introduces programmed structural optimization into the panels, using custom arrangements for each layer of poles. A third project aims to control the form of bamboo poles by monitoring and rotating the plants as they grow in relationship to light using a digitally controlled apparatus.

“Bioagency is borne from nature but enabled by technology, aimed not at creating high performance materials but at the intelligent utilization of natural, rapidly renewable ones.”

Beyond bamboo, many natural materials offer rapid growth and structural promise but have not been explored due to the difficulty of working with their irregularity. In my current post at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, I am leading research to find architectural opportunities for plant species invasive to the American South. While many such species thrive in Tennessee’s temperate climate, their growth threatens existing native ecosystems, and they are often costly or near-impossible to remediate. By finding applications for these species, I seek to incentivize their removal, both making use of construction materials that can sequester carbon at the building scale and developing an approach to remediating the environment at a regional scale. This past fall, I co-taught a studio with my After Architecture cofounder, Kyle Schumann, in which students negotiated computation, material, and design intent, aiming to create a feedback loop between the three. Highlights included a project in which remediation and harvesting become a singular act through the skinning of bark, and a project in which students scanned, inventoried, and sorted the falling branches from a bradford pear tree into a computational model that adapted its design to the available parts.

In response to net-zero and carbon-negative building initiatives, such projects favor a broader view of humanity’s relationship to the environment, pursuing a symbiotic relationship between design and ecology, rather than a hierarchical positioning that places man above all else. I advocate for such a middle ground between traditional models of design authorship and natural processes — a future in which buildings are farmed and grown. If we can synthesize the intentions of the designer with natural processes, maybe there is hope for a human civilization whose aims align with the ecological needs of the planet at large.