Manifesto for Vibrant Architecture
Invite the non-human world to codesign ‘vibrant architecture’ through a shared, agile engagement with matter.
Vibrant architecture does not make its propositions through abstractions or representations, but by embracing the relentless materiality of the natural world – through ecological living materials (ELT).
There are no models of vibrant architecture, in the same way that no one organism is a model of another. Its progeny may episodically spring from the fundamental programs of dividing and expanding space.
Vibrant architecture is neither made nor born but must be coaxed into being. It is forged by a love of change, not consistency, and never tires of its own strangeness. It is compelled to grow, transform and propagate in relentless variations within its rhythmic networks.
Vibrant architecture is both object and process. Its formal rules are low-level ‘pre- natural’, chemical programs. It merges elemental infrastructures with matter in periodic exchanges, which can be fine-tuned at higher levels of organization. Ultimately, vibrant architecture resists the mathematics of ‘natural law’ and swerves with the idiosyncratic laws of quantum physics to revel in its uniqueness.
Vibrant architecture exhibits the same kind of rhythm that enabled Mendeleev to deduce the periodic table, compelled Henri Lefebvre to propose ‘no less than a new scientific method’ (Lefebvre, 2004) and inspires the musical score of the universe.
Vibrant architecture is in tune with its radically changing existence landscape, which sympathizes with the sharps and flats of the textile symphony in which it is immersed.
Vibrant architecture does not cling to the rippled underbelly of universal time but has directionality and travels with the warp and the weft in its slipstream. It deflects Newton’s apple from oscillating in its geometric course through the arrow of time – denying reversibility in the system as an expression of fundamental creativity. There is no ‘going back’.
Vibrant architecture does not pay homage to the aestheticisms of Old Nature (Van Mensvoort and Grievink, 2012). It does not sing reassuring jolly green sustainability songs, yet it is deeply entangled with the natural world and thrives on the side effects of human existence.
Vibrant architecture is empowered by its multitudinous assemblages and infrastructures to thrive in even the most hostile environments, infiltrating inaccessible terrains.
Vibrant architecture does not hanker for a time before our chemical industrial landscapes, plasticinating seas and choking skies, but regards them as new landscapes of abundance from which primordial chemical communities might spring into bloom with artificial biologies, which, until this point, have never existed.
Vibrant architecture is a transformer that does not find an adversary in machines, but swallows them whole and couples horizontally with them. Their progeny proliferates as rhizomes of vibrant networks that transmute industrial deserts into vast metabolic fabrics of increasingly lively landscapes, which bloom with co-evolutionary acts of transformation.
The surging systems and knotted materials of vibrant architecture swell with our own communities and become entangled with our habits. They thrive amongst us, in even the most densely packed domains, as codesigners of our proximate spaces.
Vibrant architecture does not exist in the future but explores our unevenly distributed present.
The delicate elemental fabrics of vibrant architecture reveal the mutual understanding between human design and material possibility – where architects set the conditions for a diversity of infrastructures that infiltrate and vibrate alongside the rhythms of our unstable Earth.
Vibrant architecture does not propose to save the world.
You see, vibrant architecture is not about making a building at all, but in establishing the codesignership between humans and non-humans, through the production of synthetic ecologies and post-natural landscapes – which become our living fabric (see Fig. 14.2).
