Architectural Design 96.1: Biodesign in Architecture

New paradigms for climate-responsive architecture

Biodesign is reshaping a millennia-old relationship between architecture and nature, shifting the field toward adaptive, collaborative modes of practice grounded in reciprocity and ecological responsibility. This issue of Architectural Design traces that shift from speculative metaphor to an operational design framework, arguing that architecture is undergoing a fundamental reorientation around living systems.
Here, biology becomes collaborator, model and medium, rather than a passive resource to be extracted. Contributors propose an architecture that behaves metabolically--growing, digesting, adapting and decaying in concert with ecological cycles--positioning architects as cultivators of biological processes and regenerative material flows. Across living biocomposites, biodigital platforms and relational, biotic architectures, the issue advances an ethics, politics and aesthetics that decenter the human and conceive the built environment as continuous with, and accountable to, the ecologies it sustains.
Contributors include: Rachel Armstrong, Phil Ayres, Richard Beckett, Beatriz Colomina, Marcos Cruz, Jonathan Dessi-Olive, Nancy Diniz, Joyce Hwang, Kyoung Hee Kim, Maria Kuptsova, Mae-ling Lokko, Frank Melendez, Paul Nicholas, Brenda Parker, Claudia Pasquero, Marco Poletto, Ronald Rael, Ehab Sayed, Milad Showkatbakhsh, Neil Spiller, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, Michael Weinstock, Mark Wigley.