FUTURE SPECIAL..LIVING ROOM

THE ‘LIVING’ ROOM
Imagine coming home to a drawing room whose very pores breathe and soothe you after a rough day. There are sensors that can detect the carbon dioxide you breathe out, change the lighting to suit your mood and shush your grinding nerves. And the exterior of your home isn’t some stolid, ungiving structure — it is made of a living cladding that can nurture plant life and be altered without much heartache. It could even tell you when the walls need a new coat of paint or even indicate toxin levels by changing colours. This dream architecture that can change the way our cities grow, says Rachel Armstrong, senior research scholar at the School of Architecture and Construction in University of Greenwich, is not available yet but isn’t all that far from becoming a reality either. At the Venice Biennale last year, Armstrong along with Philip Beesley and Rob Gorbet, set up a fascinating Hylozoic Ground, lifelike installation that captures some of these ideas. The ground is a synthetic jungle, made of feathery plastic components that have been digitally fabricated and woven together into a living sculpture that responds to its environment and visitors through a primitive sensory network equipped with digital proximity sensors. “Hylozoic Ground is incredibly moving as an experience creating an intimate, immersive, life-like interior that connects with primordial, nurturing emotions reminiscent of being new born where audiences are smelt, licked and stimulated into awareness through a nurturing ‘being’,” says Armstrong. Living technologies, she says, are particularly relevant to India where there is a great deal of inequality in the quality of life and there is a need for a new kind of economy that is not based on industrial processes. “Essentially the West has offloaded its carbon debt to the East and this could be an opportunity for carbon fixing living technologies to provide a new economic basis and provide India with an opportunity to lead the world in these kinds of technologies,” she says. The futurist believes that it is vital in the future to create buildings that can adapt and evolve with changing population dynamics, resources and climate change with minimal use of energy resources. Not quite the property boom that will help builders profiteer but to which they have to be dragged kicking and screaming anyways, says Armstrong.
TOICRST 12NOV11