Genetically engineered plants could detect microbiome changes in the built environment

No abstract

Design is approaching a crucial period where the exchange between interior and exterior systems needs to be rethought and addressed from the standpoint of resilience and innovative environmental responses. The era of the detached interior bubble that is climate controlled and therein severed from natural systems is no longer justified or feasible. Interior spaces must respond to environmental conditions and proactively engage natural systems. The paper examines grafting methodology as an interior spatial formula that aims to generate complex sectional strategies for new programmatic typologies. It showcases work from a third-year interior architecture studio where students utilised natural landscapes as the premise to develop generative computational models that informed their design interventions.While placing interior interventions between natural and synthetic processes, interior grafts outline a design tactic that challenges the disjunction between internal settings and external parameters. The potential to draw relevance from external parameters and integrate the derivative systems into the interior volume carries many implications for interior architecture and urban dynamics. This approach demarks a radical repositioning of the interior volume as a continuation of the exterior scape, proliferating a fluid and active interiority.

As a result of the pressing environmental and technological conditions dominant today, new frontiers for architectural production are emerging. Fueled by accelerated change and increased connectivity, these trajectories operate across multiple scales and domains. The evolving relationship between place, technology, and occupancy formulates a complex active structure that tends to have fluctuating levels of activity and impact. These conditions are giving way to hybridized settings where the interdependence of digital and analog is altering the very politics of place and identity. In response to the prevalence of amalgamated settings, the paradigm of “Dynamic Landscapes, Emerging Territories” is presented. Dynamic Landscapes have definitions and presence in multiple locations simultaneously, requiring new methods of documentation and assessment in order to conceive appropriate design responses. The paper uses the Syrian Refugee Crisis as a case study for deciphering the implications inherent in displacement in the context of dynamic landscapes. Furthermore, it presents an opportunity to think of new architectural trajectories rooted and driven by the animation of such sites. Inherently dynamic, forced displacement presents rich emerging territories where design carries significant impact and facilitates a tangible reassessment of a refugee’s narrative. Supported by robust information networks and active feedback loops, displaced landscapes as such can learn from their residents and inform their imminent futures specifically, as well as our collective human occupancy at large. Within constantly changing milieus, architecture’s premises and processes are being challenged to respond to fluctuating contexts and provide for transient occupancies. While some may see this as a loss of spatial agency when it comes to design, these conditions present an opportunity to think of new architectural trajectories that are rooted and driven by the dynamism of multilayered landscapes and new approaches towards practice.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has placed immense value on our interior settings and their respective objects. As a result, interior spaces, augmented with virtual streams of data, are becoming instrumental settings for everyday activities. Such a state engenders new thinking regarding interior space, one in which private settings are understood as primary nodes for public exchanges. The implications of this new environment are all-encompassing, positioning the most intimate places and objects at the core of improvised virtual communities and subjecting private spaces to rapid retooling to address unfamiliar urgencies. The resulting condition  is one of amalgamated physical and virtual parameters, often with discordant assemblies. Central to this unfolding state of affairs, technology has emerged as an indispensable medium. The legibility of our settings through digital devices has led to a new type of processed interior space; fragmented and dispersed across various localities, it is unified through its reading within the boundary of the screen. This article presents a set of graphic reflections on computer-screen interiors, coined screenteriors. While this new public interior was courtesy of a global pandemic, it is here to stay. Screenteriors are set within our intimate places and privy to various facets of our everyday lives. They are transmitted in real-time and often recorded on distant storage clouds, scrambled at times, subject to delays and freezes, filtered, and modified at will, streamed back and forth between recipients and devices, and always under the gaze of the camera. Here and now, a new interior emerges where screens frame and interpolate a new typology of space.