Digital Botanic Architecture

As I was researching information on adaptive environments embedded in architecture, I came across this book by Dennis Dollens. Although it is not directly related to what I am interested in, Dollens presents an interesting synthesis between architecture and biology, specifically botanic architecture. He argues that with architecture being reduced to the concept of a machine (or object), it has been divorced from the notion of being a living organism that is capable of growing and adapting.

"If man's phenomenal success in colonizing all parts of the globe is specifically owing to technology - sanitary/health, heating/cooling, and transportation systems, etc. - then it makes at least partial sense to look to technology for evolving and correcting the seemingly uncorrectable mess that success has caused it. In a sense, to regrow or overgrow development."

He conducts biomimetic research to investigate how vegetation (morphological properties) can be integrated with architectural systems like structural framing.

"Importantly, biomimetic investigation can be used to produce architectural and design prototypes where morphological qualities of a plant, say leaf overlap, or asymmetric harmonic proportion (Fibonacci phyllotaxis) can be applied to the shape and function of potential architectural structures and surfaces while maintaing a linked consideration of the new material properties intended to bring the structure into being as a bioanimate environmental participant and sensor."

For Dollens, his concern is that architecture in its regard as a machine has lost its biological connections and thereby no longer able to respond to environmental conditions. Through understanding Louis Sullivan's A System of Architectural Ornament, Dollens literally applies the theory of "form follows function" through the investigation of botany and its behaviour. He uses digital technology (Xfrog with algorithmic based controls) as a strategy to synthesize architecture with biology.