Architecture is part of the earth’s living system whether we acknowledge it or not. Our construction activity can be complementary to life’s processes, or it can contradict and damage them. The decision is up to the architect, the client, and society at large. It might be a good idea to stop imposing architecture as the will of one or a few individuals, and allow design to arise in a more biological manner. The question is: how can architecture itself be turned into an ecological system? 

We can mimic the actual process whereby biological forms arise: they develop as specific groupings of systems, and evolve to solve specific problems. The resulting organic forms are intimately connected to the processes by which they grow. Note how different this idea is compared to the imposition of a form based solely on some design aesthetic.

Beginning from the many components of a building, it would be good to adapt them mutually to each other, as a key feature of the design process. How does one do this in practice? The method of decomposition and refactoring helps: it makes it possible to visualize subsystems, and to make sure they all cooperate with each other.

For example, designing a building involves at least five distinct system decompositions. These could be concerned with: 

(i) Harmonizing the building’s exterior with its environment and avoidance of geometrical conflict, which of course includes adaptation to climate, orientation to the local solar and weather patterns, etc. 
(ii) Connecting the site to the circulation networks present in its environment. 
(iii) Shaping public spaces, from a sidewalk to one or more open plazas. 
(iv) Planning interior paths for comfortable connection and flow.
(v) Identifying the interior spaces in relationship to each other. 

There could be other systems as well, based upon individual needs, conditions, and uses.

The living environment, be it natural or man-made, is a fabric of connections between systems with definite geometrical characteristics. Such an environment needs to evolve its own design to a large degree in order to be both practical and pleasant to use. It also has to be allowed to evolve after it is built. Adaptation need not stop on inauguration day. Note that traditional environments continued to evolve for centuries, with harmful growth kept in check by a commonly-accepted form language and the strict application of evolved pattern languages.

The key to successful design is adaptation. On the shortest timescale, this requires that individual users are able to alter the material structure of the building in some way so as to optimize the information exchange. Something as simple as the ability to open a window and close shutters or curtains achieves this objective. But notice how the deterministic approach of most of contemporary architecture has ended this freedom: windows are designed as hermetically sealed, an integral part of the wall so they don’t open. 

Adaptation of the design to human use, before the building is built, occurs only if the design process follows a number of steps coupled with feedback. There can never be a top-down imposition of a ready-made form appearing from within the architect’s mind. Furthermore, adaptive design is the opposite of either generic or minimalist design. Those are mutually incompatible approaches to the built environment. 

We are talking about architecture as if it’s a system that possesses its own intentionality and the capacity to adapt. Not architecture as the expression and imposition of some human will, which has unfortunately become the norm in our post-industrial age. Exploring this idea brings us to a list of seven qualities that all living systems satisfy.

Living structure is known to manifest several natural properties such as: 

1. organized-complexity (information storage); 
2. metabolism (energy use); 
3. replication (self-reproduction);
4. adaptation (the organism changes itself to better profit from its environment); 
5. intervention (the organism changes its environment); 
6. situatedness (embedded in the world through sensors); 
7. connectivity (information processing). 

In biological entities, all the above processes usually occur together, but theoretically, these are separate concepts.

We have spent much of this course in describing organized complexity, and how to measure it using various techniques. Biological structures and processes work through mechanisms that are both complex and organized. The same holds true for the products of traditional architectures. Information from structures that optimize human life and actions is condensed and encoded into the traditional built urban fabric. This encoding leads to ornament on the smaller scales, and to a network of connected urban paths and spaces on the larger scales.

Let’s now examine the above biological mechanisms in more detail. Metabolism is the exchange of information and materials with the environment, and keeps an organism’s organized complexity at the required level to maintain life. In the architectural analogy, buildings metabolize via weathering and repair. Notice how modernist architects tried to deny metabolism for buildings, by seeking an elusive non-weathering material. Even though the search was a failure, it was the original idea that denies architecture as a living process.

Replication is the process of creating copies of a structure. Generations of organisms have evolved to a certain coherent form, and an individual organism preserves that successful template by making copies of itself. Buildings also replicate, as a successful typology will be copied. Modernist buildings were remarkably prolific in replicating around the world, despite their documented serious flaws in adaptation to climate, energy, and human use.

However, an answer to this puzzle (i.e. replication despite the non-adaptation) can be found in the marked simplicity of modernist buildings as compared to traditional buildings. The former are more akin to viruses because they neither metabolize, nor adapt to their environment. This gives them a replicating advantage because they have less complexity to reproduce.

Biological organisms adapt to their environment in two distinct ways. First, sensory organs adapt to the immediate situation on the short term using feedback, which is necessary for the survival of the organism. Second, the genetic pool (but not any individual organism) adapts to changing conditions, or to profit from an advantageous change acting on the longer term. This is evolution.

We face a contradiction with modernist typologies that do not adapt — being instead an international style — yet are very successful at proliferating. It is still possible to understand this as an adaptation, not to the actual user, but to the client who builds speculatively. Typical modernist construction offers advantages to the steel, glass, and concrete industries, and to a number of engineering firms that now dominate the construction market. Those players make tremendous profits from the now standardized industrial building techniques. The present economic model based on cheap fossil energy drives the worldwide reproduction of non-adaptive buildings. 

Moving to the other properties of living structure, intervention actively changes an organism’s environment. The act of building is an intervention. Buildings that can influence their immediate environment through passive or active energy use act in this manner. There is, of course, a tremendous difference between passive temperature control and the use of fossil fuels to achieve the same result. And these two very distinct ways of energy intervention lead to radically different typologies for the buildings themselves. 

All organisms are situated, because they are embedded in the natural environment. They possess sensory mechanisms that dictate and adjust the organism’s behavior through feedback. Organisms are constantly sensing their surroundings. Buildings normally don’t do that, yet with recent advances in technology, we now have the capacity to create intelligent buildings. I believe the architectural profession is handicapped by almost a century of non-adapted buildings, however, and is not prepared to use sensors towards adaptation. The only practical reason to sense the environment is to then respond to it via adaptation and intervention. New, experimental design is finally leading in this promising direction. 

Life works through connected structures. All living tissue contributes to create a connected complex system, which is the organism. Furthermore, each organism is connected intimately to its environment. A living system connects chemically with its food, using metabolism to generate energy. Life also depends upon acquiring and actively using information from the environment: avoiding damage and threats, or seeking beneficial situations. Another informational system consists of internal sensors that tell the organism that all of its own components are working well. Yet another informational system is the genetic information that defines the organism’s structure.

Why don’t all buildings embody living structure? They could, but architects and society at large have been sidetracked by a bug in our cognitive system. Humans have the unique ability among other organisms to carry an abstract representation of the world in their minds. This ability allows us to learn from our environment and to store information for future use. It is also liable to corruption, however. People tend to manufacture a false and hence dangerous alternative reality, and then base their actions upon that non-living fantasy world, instead of the natural world. This leads to disconnection from the real world, and its symptoms can be seen in the non-adaptive architecture of the 20^th and 21^stcenturies.