Tiffany O'Callaghan, CultureLab editor
(Image: DPA/Press Association Images)
An architect and designer with a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mitchell Joachim is the founder of the non-profit green design group Terreform and a leader in the "urbaneering" movement, which invites communities to participate in urban design projects. His latest project is a collaboration between architects and biologists to construct a biosynthetic seat. New Scientist talked to him about experimenting with synthetic biology, his controversial "meat house" project and whether one day we'll be able to grow our own homes - and villages.
What is an example of a successful urbaneering project?
One of the earlier ones, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was really successful. This was 300 acres [120 hectares] of urban space along the waterfront of New York that had been more or less inactive. We had? people involved in that neighbourhood and adjacent neighbourhoods, and a lot of architects and urban designers and planners discussing what we could do. Now we're turning the project into a space for clean tech and innovation.
How can we create the ideal city?
First and foremost you need to have the idea of what the ideal living space or urban environment might be - a picture of that utopic or semi-utopic space. I like to use the analogy of going to the gym. If you go to the gym and your goal is, "I want to look just like David Beckham," then that drives you to do certain things. You may never look like Beckham, but it is a goal. Cities need the same thing. They need a vision and a plan for their ideal physique.
(Image: Mitchell Joachim, Lara Greden and Javier Arbona)
Your green project, Fab Tree Hab, is the idea for a house grown and constructed from living trees. What gave you the idea?
MIT was getting involved in solving the energy crisis. Buildings are certainly an enormous suck on the grid. In the architecture department we thought, well, even cutting down trees to bring them to a place to be built into something is a waste of energy. Let's just try growing them on site. We found technology that is 2500 years old, pleaching. We focused on that technology and combined it with our knowledge of 3D computation, building out complex geometries, to produce scaffolds that would nudge nature into a usable volume. We tried to be 100 per cent self-reliant - a home that was not efficient, and not zero, but really a positive contribution.
Do you think this is the future? Will we grow our own homes?
Well, yes, but I don't see it being universal. I think it will be one of many choices. This is the most extreme green version that I could possibly have thought of, but there will be many other solutions. I also understand the various problems with something like this. With any experimental house, there are various problems and this one requires understanding the field of botany and biology more than the typical architect, carpenter or developers would normally have to.
What is the synthetic biology seat you have been working on?
For the Genetic Generation Seat, or Gen2Seat, we've produced a new biopolymer. We took the base form of reishi mushrooms and combined it with cellulose made by acetobacter bacteria. Then my colleagues Oliver Medvedik and Ellen Jorgensen genetically expressed chitin [the chemical that makes insects' shells hard, among other things] inside the acetobacter to give it some level of waterproofing and hardness. All three of these elements combined to be a new biopolymer.
Another collaboration of yours that has got a lot of attention is the "meat house". What did that idea spring from?
The meat project was looking at tissue engineering and exploring some of the possibilities with regenerative medicine on what could happen with form - shapes and industrially designed objects - with those same techniques. There was an awful lot of rejection in the beginning. One research scientist that learned of the project was slightly upset, he said it was for cancer research, for people who need to replace a certain organ, and this use was demeaning.
But if we didn't put out the meat house, or in vitro meat habitat, as a kind of question on what else can we do with this particular subset of science, everything else would have been harder. The project attracted so many people, who thought, "Wow, we can hack tissue, what else can synthetic biology do?"
Sounds like it raised some questions
We still have very little understanding of how we can tweak form or shape at the genetic level. We certainly haven't unlocked those secrets. There have been some successes with small adjustments, but you can't look at a person's hand and say, "I know how that hand got to be that shape, I know how the geometry was determined and the volume was determined. I knew which genetic switch did that, what sequence caused it." I think this is where architects can absolutely get married to biologists. Once we know what creates shape, what the extents and limitations of form are, that becomes really exciting. It might not happen in my lifetime; maybe it is for the next generation.
What will we be able to do with this understanding?
Find the real extended phenotype of people. Birds have nests that seem to be inherent. I think there must be some kind of extended phenotype for humans. People probably have, inherently inside them the perfect psychological space that can be grown or developed at multiple levels. Maybe it's a womb or some kind of variant on a womb, something that's safe and performs or adapts to our needs. Right now I would say that is the big thesis question.
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