Meeting Nature Halfway. Architecture Interfaced between Technology and Environment
The planet needs new paradigms to re-evaluate a confused relationship between architecture and nature. Meeting Nature Halfway is an initiative by Studio Colletti, Department of Experimental Architecture, Innsbruck Austria, that engages architects, and the public, to think how buildings can be designed more intelligently – i.e., by implementing digital, computational, and robotic technologies – and how they can be made more intelligent – e.g., by rendering them more responsive to the environment.
Cross-border/international
Austria
Italy
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: France
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Estonia
Member State(s), Western Balkans and other countries: Other
{Empty}
Mainly rural
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Studio Colletti - Unit Hochbau, Department of Experimental Architecture, Universität Innsbruck Austria Type of organisation: University or another research institution First name of representative: Marjan Last name of representative: Colletti Gender: Male Nationality: Italy Function: University Professor, former Head of Department, Project Lead Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Studio Colletti - Unit Hochbau, Department of Experimental Architecture, Universität Innsbruck Austria,Technikerstrasse 21 / 3.OG Nord Town: Innsbruck Postal code: 6020 Country: Austria Direct Tel:+43 512 50764610 E-mail:marjan.colletti@uibk.ac.at Website:https://www.exparch.at
Since 2016, Studio Colletti, Unit Hochbau, Department of Experimental Architecture at Universität Innsbruck Austria, has operated under the umbrella theme ‘Meeting Nature Halfway’ (MNH) to elaborate on ways of reconnecting with nature in the 21st century. Many design studios, theses, elective courses, and research projects were delivered, with the team gathering a multitude of design-, technology- and environment-based perspectives to show students how a modern understanding of both nature and technology may be useful in the construction of intelligent buildings.
In 2018 the book entitled Meeting Nature Halfway. Architecture Interfaced between Technology and Environment, edited by Prof. Marjan Colletti PhD with Dr. Peter Massin, was published. Seen as a ‘contribution to ecosophy’, it shows different approaches, united by a shared interest, and consensus, to develop a new paradigm, a renewed relationship, between architecture and nature. Several other related projects followed suit: e.g., Pahoehoe Beauty Linz 2018 and Terrestrial Reef London 2019, demonstrating the commitment to implementing the initiative in practice.
MNH is influenced by Umberto Eco’s concept of the ‘open work’ and embraces a ‘new way of seeing, feeling, understanding, and accepting a universe in which traditional relationships have been shattered and new possibilities of relationship are being laboriously sketched out’ (i.e., transdisciplinarity), the ‘organic fusion of multiple elements’ (i.e., postdigitality) and ‘controlled disorder’ (i.e., beauty) [Eco, 1962]. MNH challenges the clichés that architecture solely deals with edifices (i.e., the built environment), that building technology merely answers to the construction industry (i.e., acceptance of the status quo), and that the production of buildings cannot profit from other industries (i.e., biotechnology, robotic automation): architecture needs new paradigms to integrate buildings between technology and the environment.
Re-naturalisation
Robotic-fabrication
Bespoke-materials
3D-printing
Trans-ference
Rethinking how buildings are made can have a considerable impact on increasing biodiversity and on lowering costs, i.e., save shipping and personnel expenses, drop energy and time loss. MNH engages staff and students to think how a 21st century understanding of nature and technology can play a relevant role in making buildings: 1) more intelligently, i.e. learning to design with natural phenomena and not against, taking sun, light, wind, ventilation, shadow, evaporation, humidity, weather, climate etc. into consideration, and 2) more intelligent, i.e., by endeavouring to render architecture more proactive and turn from a passive system (e.g., passive house) into an active operational (mechanical, electronic, material-based etc.) system to make buildings ‘work harder’ and thus make them in their dynamism, agility and openness, more sustainable.
Because the study of fabrication and assembly protocols, shapes and joints, structures and skins goes hand in hand with material production, its behaviour, properties, parameters and capacities, together with students we developed multiple approaches to meet sustainable goals in terms of material systems, manufacturing techniques, aggregation logics, topographical and meteorological specificities, etc.
We believe that MNH exemplarily succeeded in demonstrating that a sustainable agenda does not necessarily result in over-conventional, pragmatic yet one-dimensional architecture. Sustainable ≠ necessarily standard. Our aim was to be experimental – backing the Department’s programme – to widen students’ vocabulary and broaden their horizon. This was possible thanks to the multitude of international voices and knowhows invited, due to the plethora of briefs and sites, and the numerous digital toolkits used to achieve this: CAD, CAD-CAM, CNC, 3D printing, robotic fabrication, computation. MNH consistently tackled and delivered on SDGs 4, 9, 11 and GreenComp’s 12 competences, as addressed in the final point of this submission.
It is given that buildings are exposed to the forces of nature. After all, their intrinsic sheltering function is paramount to architecture. The wish to meet nature halfway suggests opening up to nature’s forces, challenging all three archetypical Vitruvian qualities: firmitas (soundness), utilitas (usefulness) and venustas (beauty). Since we teach Building Design and Construction, soundness and usefulness are almost natural problems to research. However, the pursuit of beauty and aesthetics is most architects' common endeavour, as it is for the applicants, the department, and its peers.
The history of architecture is also a history (as well as many other parallel histories) of materials, material innovation, material assembly and fabrication and how they have drastically changed the discipline. This did apply in the past to the material integration of stone, concrete, steel, glass, timber; and it is happening in the present too, due to material innovation or composite thinking and the implementation of CAD-CAM technologies, and will similarly affect hitherto unknown material discoveries and manufacturing paradigms of the future. Of course, materiality and techniques have great influence on the way things are designed, and perceived. These are integral elements of digital aesthetics and digital poetics (Digital Poetics is the title of a monograph by the applicant), in MNH augmented to postdigital aesthetic by further stepping into data simulation, automation, and material advances – as demonstrated in the publication.
Thus, MNH delivers an illustrative palimpsest of how contemporary digital software and hardware packages allow designers to envision inclusive, collaborative and nature-technology interfaced architectures. MNH shows possible ways to cope with, and boost, the realisation of complex forms, rich textures, performative ornaments by lowering the levitating financial impact of bespoke shapes, conventional fabrication and labour-intensive assembly.
The project was developed with the premise that top-down tactics of delivering knowledge in architectural education should be considered out-dated, ineffective and unproductive, and that education ought to adopt a more inclusive and bottom-up approach towards research-led education. The studio made sure all academic programmes were equitable and unbiassed, enabling students of all years (from first year to PhD students), with or without digital and robotic skills, with or without workshop and lab experience, to join the courses, which were designed to be barrier-free, gender-neutral, and at no additional costs to produce large prototypes or models. Furthermore, thanks to the plentiful invited professors, students had the possibility to engage in a dialogue with different voices and opinions, seniority (from upcoming young researchers to international specialists), and cultures (from Thailand to India, Israel, EU, UK and USA etc.).
Naturally, the briefs and topics were written to be inclusive, and tackling local and global issues, including climate change, mobility, tourism, food production, societal change, landscape and urbanisation etc.).
MNH may thus be seen as exemplary also because its body of research looks at how contemporary architectural design can be more inclusive and integrate art, craft and the sciences into its realm. The studio’s transdisciplinary (‘trans’ as cutting across several disciplines) working ethos included researchers and partners from other realms to experience architectural design, and encouraged architecture students to hear and learn from other disciplines, ranging from engineering, material science, fashion design, micro-biology etc. This experience of inclusivity (e.g., project Triopic Spectacle 2021) and knowledge transfer during MNH enabled the applicants to later successfully be awarded a 400.000 EUR transdisciplinary grant by the FWF Austrian Science Fund, PEEK strand, entitled Postdigital Neobaroque (2019-2023).
The projects showcased in the book have been exhibited and presented in Innsbruck, Graz, Linz and Vienna Austria, in Paris and Orléans France, in London UK, in Trento and Venice Italy, Tallinn Estonia, Lofoten Norway, Ann Arbor Michigan USA et al. Some venues, such as the Ars Electronica in Linz, attract 100000 visitors in a few days. The Coralloid Cocoons project, for example, was extremely well received by the public, resulting in interviews by kindergarten children and children with disabilities, and reports in national newspapers and televisions. The Alpine Studio and Arctic Studios, as another example, was supported by public bodies such as Land Tirol, Tourism Alpbach etc. as they embraced the social and civic relevance of the given briefs.
The project’s explicit focus on the relationship nature-technology had an immediate impact on several other initiatives and projects that followed: several other 1:1 installations exhibited at the Ars Electronica, the Venice Biennale, and the Royal Chelsea Flower Show in London, but with an even stronger sustainable and ecological agenda, as the 3D-printed materials became 100% organic and decomposable (projects Pahoehoe Beauty, Terrestrial Reef etc.) or recycling PET bottles as pellets for 3D printing or developing with students bespoke fully organic 3D-printable materials (Postdigital Natures of Planet B, the academic course Km 0 Architecture – Grow/Print your Own Building etc).
In general, MNH allowed the studio and its very many courses to consider the rapport between nature and technology an a priori design parameter, hoping that the generations of students involved in this project, once architects, will continue this agenda and improve, with their more responsible practices, everybody’s life.
We engaged five invited international guest professors to run design studios on MNH: Theodore Spyropoulos (AA London, Minimaforms), François Roche (New Territories Bangkok), Shajay Bhooshan (Zaha Hadid Architects, AA London), Robert Stuart-Smith (rs-sdesign, Kokkugia, AA London), Stefan Holst (Transsolar KlimaEngineering), plus Rames Najjar as endowed professorship for Fundamentals of Building Construction. Various international workshops were run at or with: The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL London, GSD Harvard, Angewandte Vienna, EPFL Lausanne, ETH Zurich, Taubman College, Virginia Tech.
Besides projects, several essays were delivered by Marjan Colletti, Peter Massin, the abovementioned guest-professors, Jaafar Chalabi (Vienna), Sir Peter Cook (London), Marcos Cruz (London, Barcelona), Oliver Domeisen (London, Zurich), Volker Flamm (Innsbruck), Georg Grasser (Innsbruck, Vienna), Marc Ihle (Lofoten, Innsbruck), Nathan King (Virginia), Johannes Ladinig (Innsbruck), Bart Lootsma (Innsbruck, Linz), Adam Orlinski (Vienna), Clemens Preisinger (Vienna), Ali Rahim (New York, Philadelphia), Yael Reisner (London, Tel Aviv), Kristina Schinegger and Stefan Rutzinger (Vienna, Innsbruck), Franz Sam (Vienna), Pino Scaglione (Trento), Gilbert Sommer (Innsbruck), students.
Other stakeholders include: REX|LAB, Ars Electronica, RobArch, Smart Geometry, Great London Authority, UCL, Department of English Studies, JUFF Fachbereich Integration, MA III Stadtplanung, Stadtentwicklung und Integration Innsbruck, Swarovski, Iris van Herpen, Grassmayr Bell Foundry, Tallinn Architecture Biennale, cityX Melbourne, ETH Zurich, Baumit GmbH, Architecture Association, HdA Graz, alp-S, Grid-It, Laserdata, Alpbachtal, SkiJuwel Alpbachtal. The book was sponsored by Vice-Rectorate Research Universität Innsbruck, Faculty of Architecture Innsbruck, Department of Experimental Architecture, Land Tirol Abteilung Kultur, Hypo Tirol Bank, and Euregio European Region Tyrol–South Tyrol–Trentino.
This research looks at how contemporary architectural digital design can be more inclusive and transdisciplinary by integrating various skill sets of crafts, industries and sciences into its realm.
In terms of crafts: projects such as Porous Cast necessitated expertise in bronze casting (given by 500-year-old bell foundry), the Quaquaversal Centrepiece required know-how from a fashion designer, and several other branches of industry to make it happen, i.e., Swarovski.
In terms of industries: several software packages were developed (TACO) that are now utilised by international institutions, as was specific hardware (several end effectors) to adapt existing industry solutions to the specificities of 3D extrusion by robotic arms. Such endeavours resulted in the successful co-development of industry-ready products (BauMinator® by Baumit GmbH) and the launch of a spin-off, Incremental3D. A follow-up project, the 350/360 Cohesion Cocoon 3D-printed pavilion designed for the University of Innsbruck’s 350th anniversary, 2019, involved partners from the Department of Structural Engineering and Material Science, Unit Concrete Structures and Bridge Design, Faculty of Engineering Science, the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands 3D Concrete Printing research group, the University of Innsbruck spin-off incremental3d GmbH, and construction companies Baumit GmbH and PORR Bau GmbH.
In terms of sciences: knowledge-transfer mechanisms were pursued to hybridise know-how to/from the building industry and other creative disciplines. Strategies of scaling-up small-size desktop printing into larger dimensions, particularly in concrete (e.g., Liquid Rock), demanded expert knowledge outside of architecture, to handle transport logistics, assembly and disassembly strategies, material behaviour, predictability, and equipment capabilities. Projects such as the Algae Cellunoi, the Alga(e)zebo, and Terrestrial Reef needed input from microbiologists and fungiculturists.
MNH does not regard nature and technology as separate and incompatible realms. Instead, our research-driven and design-led educational approach suggests that such binary approach is blatantly surpassed (potentially even dangerous, ecologically) and made obsolete by digital and computational design and fabrication intelligence. Advanced digital modelling and simulating tools (structural and environmental analysis, growth algorithms, inverse kinematics, GIS, etc.) allow designers to predict form and performance prior to materialisation. Besides the great advantages in terms of design control, this insight unlocks architecture to a truly transdisciplinary and bottom-up approach that takes nature and technological advances as its starting points to create a novel, innovative, and beautiful architectural canon – and not vice-versa.
Compared to other similar initiatives, it is the intentionality to use architectural design to hybridise a dual approach that makes MNH a highly innovative, original, hopefully unique initiative. One the one hand, the project pushes technology to get closer to nature: by 4D computational simulations, 4D robotic fabrication, and 4D design (programme, form, site, typology, etc.). On the other hand, it investigates how our understanding of nature can be mobilised to let it encounter technology with more ease: by 4D material alchemy, 4D analysis of atmospheric, meteorological and climatic conditions, and 4D design (again: programme, form, site, typology, etc.).
We hence now co-author novel material-material assemblages, new material-nature aggregations and processes of growth, change, mutation by applying some of the know-how of engineering, robotics, material sciences, biology, biotechnology etc. on an architectural scale. This material alchemy, involving material, fabrication, and technologies, is very rarely found in educational environments, although it clearly positively affects overall aesthetics, contextual strategies, and detailing.
In theory, students and peers can replicate and transfer all elements of MNH to other places, groups of beneficiaries and contexts.
In fact, environment, understood as the natural surroundings around us, ranging from urban to rural, from jungle to desert, exists everywhere. In our case it was partly the alpine environment (which does not only mean the Alps), i.e., mountainous, rugged, and rocky; but the agenda has validity everywhere. Environment can also denote a virtual, software-based domain: a simulation programme, or a multi-move robotic setup, provide specific settings that require careful consideration of ways of interaction and integration of design manoeuvres, too. Digitality is ubiquitous, and everybody can be skilled up. Indeed, technology exists everywhere. In our case it was digital technology and robotic fabrication, potentially seen as hi-tech technologies (as we are privileged to be in Europe). But very many of the strategies and aesthetics developed throughout MNH are not hi-tech per se; hence the research into material systems that deviate from the norm. Less favoured communities or universities may not have the equipment at disposal as we did (many have much more than we do), but this does not disqualify them from meeting nature halfway. On the contrary, we are always on the lookout to find collaborations to apply our findings elsewhere.
In practice, it takes a unique mix of expertise, motivation, and skills to simultaneously and successfully address design, technology, techniques, form, function, context... MNH was only possible thanks to the collegial and open-minded atmosphere that the project instigated: a rare situation, but not a unique one.
In truth, the fact that the project was undertaken with international professors declares it as a product of transferability per se. Due to the globality of its constituent elements, it can act as melting pot for different cultural stances, and as a translating device of interfacing strategies.
Our chosen methodology was one of transference: transscalar, transrelational, and transdisciplinary.
In terms of transscalarity: on a microscale we researched robotically-aided fabrication processes in our robotic experimentation lab REX|LAB to 3D print prototypes 1:1 and to exhibit them internationally; on a mesoscale we designed and detailed passive and active buildings that are aware of their settings; on a macroscale we investigated the impact of an increasingly disrupted and desynchronised industrialisation of the Alps, in contrast with current and future sustainable ideas of protecting and preserving such territory.
In terms of transrelationality: architecture is in nature: if we think of inserts as implants, sometimes prosthetics, then architecture reveals itself as technological artifice; architecture learns from nature, as it has always looked at the latter and tried to extract knowledge from the environment in various ways: from form to ornament, from geometries to systems, from micro to macro; architecture with nature elaborated by what processes architecture can learn from the environment by monitoring, discerning and negotiating nature as climate, weather and forces – this was achievable partly by computing, and adapting to, the soft matter of architecture: air, water, wind, temperature, climate, seasons and so on; architecture as nature suggests ways of embracing, appropriating and empathising with nature as organised matter, approximated geometry and robotic systems; architecture after nature could not be disregarded as option (in other terms how to react if humanity fails to meet nature halfway and a plan B has to be implemented).
In terms of transdisciplinary (as addressed): the projects (designed and built) required the expertise of architects, historians, engineers (structural, environmental), scientists (material, computer, robotic), fashion designers, industry and media partners, artists, microbiologists, etc.
The main global challenges addressed in MNH are: how does the hefty weight of ecological and economical responsibility, which was recently (at last) put upon the discipline’s shoulders, drastically challenges conventional architectural approaches in terms of design, fabrication, and aesthetics; how can architecture surpass a 20th-century modernist disinterestedness and severance from nature and turn into an interface between the natural domain and the artificial domain?
The first main local solutions investigated deals with the Tyrolean context: mountains, seasons (sun-snow), frictions between native and tourist-related policies. Unsurprisingly, one of the major research areas at the University of Innsbruck is ‘Alpine Space – Man and Environment’. The local topographical and meteorological Alpine extremeness has had profound influences on the human habitat, prompting the shapes, materials, and structures of vernacular architecture, and will continue doing so in the future. In addition, global extreme climatological and socio-political phenomena are impacting on the way architecture and infrastructures will have to adapt. Social mobility, vehicular traffic and tourist infrastructures take their toll on Tyrol, too. In parallel, climatic and atmospheric changes such as condensation, solar radiation, wind flows etc. instigate drastic fluctuations in temperature and precipitations on the region. With this general tendency of disappearing coldness and snow – very noticeable in the 2015-17 and 2022 winter seasons – not only the glaciers can be observed to retreat: tourism, possibly, too.
The second element to the sought local solutions is Zeitgeist-related. Responding to the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale’s theme ‘Reporting from the Front’, the Unit Hochbau was committed to investigating present and future modes of territorial infrastructural operations, impending constraints by lack of resources, and the necessity to aid to the production of wealth and health.
2012-16: the seeds of the initiative were laid in 2012, when the applicant founded the robotic experimentation lab REX|LAB at the Department of Experimental Architecture at Universität Innsbruck to bring a postdigital thinking to the Unit Hochbau, which at that time was host to professors Patrik Schumacher (partner Zaha Hadid Architects) and Kjetil Thorsen (co-founder Snohetta) and renowned for a highly sophisticated digital agenda.
2016-18: the proper pedagogic project MNH commences. The book gets published, alongside related chapters to six other books and three journal articles in Architectural Design (all 2016); alongside coverage on various international television programmes (Estonia, Austria, UK), favourable reviews appeared in multiple print and online publications internationally, including The New York Times (2016); Coralloid Cocoons was exhibited as part of the S+T+ARTS European initiative to foster alliances between technology and artistic practice; Venice Taevatiib was shortlisted for the Estonian pavilion at the 57th Venice Architecture Biennale (2017). Keynotes were delivered at Westminster University London (2017), Venice Architecture Biennale (2016), Adaptive Strategies, Prague and Brno (2016), Klimahouse Bolzano (2016); conference presentations at Ars Electronica Linz (2018), Venice Biennale (2018), IKA Vienna (2017), RBE UCL London (2016).
2018-present: besides rephrasing the aims as Meeting the Future Halfway, the main ambition continued, focussing on more ecological and sustainable material systems and design studio briefs: Terrestrial Reef RHS Chelsea Flower Show London (2019), 350/360 Cohesion/Cocoon Innsbruck University (2019), Liquid Curtain Spielberg (2018), Liquid Rock Galerie Göttlicher, Krems-Stein (2018) and Wachtberg Sculpture Park (2018), Pahoehoe Beauty Ars Electronica Linz (2018), Postdigital Natures of Planet B Ars Electronica, Linz (2022), Km 0 Architecture – Grow/Print your Own Building.
Meeting Nature Halfway appears to predict the similar Bringing nature back into our lives motto by COM(2020)380 - EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030. The project also seems to be very consistent in tackling, and delivering, on GreenComp’s 12 competences: it explicitly endeavours to value sustainability (in terms of aesthetics, strategies, knowledge and thinking/attitude), support fairness (being inclusive and equitable), and of course promoting nature; to embrace complexity in sustainability by novel system thinking (digital and postdigital strategies), critical thinking (how can ‘bad’ materials and techniques be challenged?), and problem framing (the overall research question: how can architecture interface between technology and environment?); to envision sustainable futures by futures literacy (proper analysis of context and data), adaptability (4D thinking), and exploratory thinking (experimentation and design); to act for sustainability by political agency (rejecting obsolete 20th century passive paradigms), collective action (as a transdisciplinary team, as a tutors-students cohort), and individual initiatives (individual student projects and specific local solutions to global problems).
