Genomic Systems Architecture: Speculating Towards an Alternate-Topia

Abstract

Biotechnologies such as genomic mapping, gene therapy and genetic engineering perceptibly allows the material human body to become a configurable entity of production, reproduction, sensation, and temporal becoming. Viewing that such conditions co-ordinate with architecture via scale, shelter, symbol and scenario, this thesis speculates upon new territories cultured by the impact of these technologies on the architectural imagination. By exploring the potential of biological material systems, it will further hypothesise a series of architectural propositions which contemplate the possible realities of inhabitation in this speculative urban ecology. Focusing on the investigation of systematic organisations that occur within biological bodies, this project centres on adapting the logic of these assemblages into computational tools. With the use of simulation systems, models of genetic and cellular growth processes are translated into programmable digital matter encoded with inherent properties and behaviours. The process can be seen as one of exploration: both in the definition of simulation logic as well as the exploration of a range of results achievable once a system has been defined. By generating these systems computationally, this thesis seeks to understand the architectonic possibilities adapted from the most basic fabric of construction, that of molecular and genetic levels of materiality. Using the body as an index of organisational investigation, attention is paid to the systematic make-up of the body as figurative principles that reform and extend purely biological processes into more comprehensive bio-technical systems for genomic architecture. Allegorical relationships between body and structure are therefore exploded, incorporating biological and architectural bodies into indiscrete and reversible territories, body-architecture hybrids, and genetically engineered architectures and structural systems. It is a redefinition of the border between building and body.