Episode 110 - The Future of Buildings Is Alive — Literally
About this episode
Dr. Rachel Armstrong discusses innovative approaches to architecture that integrate biology and sustainability.
'll be honest with you — when I first stumbled across Rachel Armstrong's papers, I genuinely thought I had the wrong person. The work was filed under architecture, but it was talking about chemistry, microbes, the origins of life, and the philosophy of matter. Rachel Armstrong is a professor at KU Leuven's Faculty of Architecture, but she trained as a medical doctor at Oxford and Cambridge, spent time working in a leprosy colony in India, accidentally ended up in an artist's kitchen in London looking at sculptures made from frozen urine in the snow, and somehow arrived at one of the most fascinating and urgent ideas I've come across in a long time: that the way we build our cities and homes is based on a fundamentally broken relationship with matter itself. We get into what it would look like to build homes that behave more like coral reefs than concrete boxes, microbial fuel cells, living bricks, why a project to save Venice using self-mineralising chemical droplets might be the most poetic engineering proposal I've ever heard, and why Rachel is taking these ideas to communities in Uganda rather than waiting for Silicon Valley to catch up. This one genuinely shifted something in…
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