Future Cities: Combined Advanced Technologies and Flexible Urban Infrastructures Rachel Armstrong Mapping the landscape for agile design The 20th century convinced us that the future has a linear trajectory that progresses incrementally – so that tomorrow is exactly like today – only a little bit different. Anything that deviates from this predetermined path is obviously […]

Fibrous Assemblages and Behavioral Composites Roland Snooks In contributing to the Funambulist, I realize the obsessions that currently occupy my attention deviate from Leopold’s editorial direction. Experiments in behavioral methodologies and their underlying multi-agent algorithms have been the focus of my design research for a decade. However, as these techniques begin to mature and are […]

BIOPHILIA + TECHNOPHILIA THROUGHOUT the course of human evolution our lives have become intrinsically tied to the evolution of technology to the point where our trajectories have become one of an interwoven existence as they continue to become interconnected through the progression of time. Infatuations with biology and technology spurred by the Industrial Revolution and […]

History of the Seven Kingdoms “LOOKING back at Paleolithic times, we can observe an evolutionary phase when human tools were embryonic, when the technium existed in its most minimal state. But since technology predated humans, appearing in primates and even earlier, we need to look beyond our own origins to understand the true nature of […]

Most materials respond either elastically or inelastically to applied stress, while repeated loading can result in mechanical fatigue. Conversely, bones and other biomechanical tissues have the ability to strengthen when subjected to recurring elastic stress. Now, researchers from Rice University and the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, have reported that a nanocomposite responds to […]

Biophilia : Technophilia (Final Narrative) Throughout the course of human evolution our lives have become intrinsically tied to the evolution of technology to the point where these two trajectories have become one of an interwoven existence as they continue to become interconnected through the progression of time. Infatuations with biology and technology spurred by the […]

-Mario De Stefano, Antonia Auletta, and Carla Langella from the 2nd University of Naples have been studying microscopic algae called diatoms. They believe humans can follow nature’s lead in seeking new sources of energy and we should explore new ways to build microscopic cellular solar panels based on biology. In the foreground of this illustration, […]

-In thinking through the development of the project I am attempting to set up a narrative that ties into future aspirations of the city [Chicago], post-human futures, and biotechnical mergers. The project is attempting to achieve an architecture which would lay forth one possible scenario culminating from the merger of biology and technology where body/building […]

-‘Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand. It turns out that chaos theory answers a question that mankind has asked for millennia – how did […]