My paper "Towards a Living Architecture" was accepted to "Expanding Bodies" ACADIA 2007 Conference, Halifax, Nova Scotia · October 4-7, 2007

Abstract: Interaction is the latest currency in architecture, with responsive components reacting to the inhabitant of the space. These units are designed, installed, by the architect with a view to the phenomenology of space, where the experience of the environment is previewed and preconstructed before it is translated into the conception of the space. However, this traditional approach with new technology leaves no scope for the architecture to be alive in and of itself, and thus the installation piece quickly becomes just that: isolated and uncontained by its environment, a spectacle for the masses. In this paper, we argue that a way to approach the architecture of responsive environments is to design for a piece that is truly living, and in order to propose a living architecture first we need to understand what the architecture of a living system is. This paper suggests a conceptual framework based on the theory of Autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980) to create a “Self-Producing” system through an experiment entitled “The Life of a Wall”. We identify several interdependent stages in the context of an environment constantly being designed and re-designed through its inhabitation. The wall has a responsive membrane controlled by a genetic algorithm reconfiguring its behaviour according to different stimuli and learns to adapt itself continually to the evolutionary properties of the environment, thus becoming a situated living piece.