Archinect - News

Bacterial cities and their building codes

2017-07-26T09:41:00-04:00

Those biophysical forces are like universal zoning rules for the biofilm cities: they govern how the inhabitants obtain food and building materials, how they can move and how they interact with one another. Just as urban planners use their knowledge of civil engineering principles and regulations to build better cities for people, microbiologists and bioengineers can use these rules to make objects more or less hospitable to the billions of cells that live in and around us.

Biofilms are, essentially, omnipresent clusters of bacteria that foul everything from sewer lines to our teeth—99.9 percent of the simple cells called prokaryotes default to living in those close quarters among millions of their compatriots. Extracelluar matrix, a sticky combination of proteins and sugars, effectively glues billions of bacteria to a surface of choice, giving biofilms their shapes and protecting the cells living at the center.

The size of the biofilm and the interaction of cells within it give the different cells the opportunity to specialize in a particular task, such as acquiring food, subverting predators or acting as a reservoir of genetic material from which to regrow the entire structure.

“We can watch these complex communities in what is essentially their natural habitat and study their structure or metabolism. There’s a lot we can learn when we can study biofilms in their whole freaky native state,” said Melissa Garren, a marine biologist at California State...

Instant, customizable digital architectural stencils hit the market

2016-09-06T14:38:00-04:00

With a press release that makes references to Banksy's iconic global stencils, the new digital architectural stencil set from Morpholio enables architects to instantly make customizable stencils of complex designs, from faces to condo layouts to intricately shaded trees. The initial image can come from a photograph, drawing, or render.

As Toru Hasegawa, co-creator of Morpholio Trace Pro explains: "Software should mirror the gestures, intuition and behavior of the creative. Trace Pro seeks to amplify it, and in doing so, make it as smart and elastic as possible."

This video illustrates the process, which involves gliding the stencil tool over a particular design, capturing it, and then replicating it/editing it at will with the assorted tool bars:

Photographer Roland Fischer captures the patterns of globalization

2015-06-11T20:15:00-04:00

You might be unsure of exactly what you’re looking at when you first see the images in Roland Fischer’s series “Facades.” [...] “I noticed all these new buildings mushrooming everywhere, giving the impression that they could as well be from any other major town in the world,” Fischer wrote via email. “I thought that this was a new urban visual experience, a consequence naturally of the then still new process of globalization.”

Cicil Street, Singapore, 2002, 180 x 125 cm (71 x 49 1/4 inches)

Highschool, Utrecht, 2013, 180 x 125 cm (71 x 49 1/4 inches)

Suntory Tokyo, 2014, 180 x 125cm (71 x 49 1/4 inches)

Bank of America, Atlanta, 2005, 180 x 125 cm (71 x 49 1/4 inches)

WTC, NY, 1999, 180 x 125 cm (71 x 49 1/4 inches)

Birmingham (day), 2007, 180 x 125 cm (71 x 49 1/4 inches)

To learn more about Roland Fischer's Facades series, click here.