It’s widely accepted that our environment is in crisis. Less widely recognized is that three quarters of environmental damage is due to cities – the places where most of us live. As this powerful new book elucidates, global sustainability is therefore directly dependent on urban design. In Living Architecture, Living Cities Christopher Day and Julie Gwilliam move beyond the current emphasis on technological change. They argue that eco-technology allows us to continue broadly as before and only defers the impending disaster. In reality, most negative environmental impacts are due to how we live and the things we buy. Such personal choices often result from dissatisfaction with our surroundings. As perceived environment has a direct effect on attitudes and motivations, improving this can achieve more sustainable lifestyles more effectively than drastic building change – with its notorious performance-gap limitations. As it’s in places that our inner feelings and material reality interact, perceived environment is place-based. Ultimately, however, as the root cause of unsustainability is attitude, real change requires moving from the current focus on buildings and technology to an emphasis on the non-material. Featuring over 400 high quality illustrations, this is essential reading for anyone who believes in the value and power of good design. Christopher Day’s philosophy will continue to inspire students with an interest in sustainable architecture, urban planning and related fields.

Soft Living Architecture explores the invention of new architectures based on living processes. It crafts a unique intersection between two fast-developing disciplines: biomimicry and biodesign in architecture, and bioinformatics and natural computing in the natural sciences. This is the first book to examine both the theory and methodology of architecture and design working directly with the natural world. It explores a range of approaches from the use of life-like systems in building design to the employment of actual growing and living cell and tissue cultures as architectural materials - creating architecture that can change, learn and grow with us. The use of 'living architecture' is cutting-edge and speculative, yet it is also inspiring a growing number of designers worldwide to adopt alternative perspectives on sustainability and environmental design. The book examines the ethical and theoretical issues arising alongside case-studies of experimental practice, to explore what we mean by 'natural' in the Anthropocene, and raise deep questions about the nature of design and the design of nature. This provocative and at times controversial book shows why it will become ever more necessary to embrace living processes in architecture if we are to thrive in a sustainable future.

"Gives voice to more than fifty extraordinary people who are currently engaged with this transformation. These individuals form a diverse community that cuts across professional disciplines, cultural, linguistic and gergraphical boundaries. They share a belief that they can make a difference through their varied efforts to expand living architectural approaches that result in biophilic, restorative buildings and healthier and more resilient communities."

Extensively illustrated with photographs and drawings, Living Architecture highlights the most exciting green roof and living wall projects in Australia and New Zealand within an international context. Cities around the world are becoming denser, with greater built form resulting in more hard surfaces and less green space, leaving little room for vegetation or habitat. One way of creating more natural environments within cities is to incorporate green roofs and walls in new buildings or to retrofit them in existing structures. This practice has long been established in Europe and elsewhere, and now Australia and New Zealand have begun to embrace it. The installation of green roofs and walls has many benefits, including the management of stormwater and improved water quality by retaining and filtering rainwater through the plants’ soil and root uptake zone; reducing the ‘urban heat island effect’ in cities; increasing real estate values around green roofs and reducing energy consumption within the interior space by shading, insulation and reducing noise level from outside; and providing biodiversity opportunities via a vertical link between the roof and the ground. This book will appeal to a wide range of readers, from students and practitioners of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and ecology, through to members of the community interested in how they can more effectively use the rooftops and walls of their homes or workplaces to increase green open space in the urban environment.

A sociologist explores why “green cities” won’t fix everything—and urges us to celebrate urban life as it is Everywhere you look, cities are getting greener. The general assumption is clear: if something is unhealthy or bad about urban life today, then nature holds the cure. However, argues sociologist Des Fitzgerald, green spaces are not the panacea that people think. In The Living City, Fitzgerald tours the international green city movement that has flourished across the world and discovers the deep, sometimes troubling, roots of our desire to connect cities to nature. Talking to policy makers, planners, scientists, and architects, Fitzgerald suggests that underneath the wish to turn future cities green is another wish: to make the modern city, and perhaps the modern world, disappear altogether. Ultimately, he makes an argument for celebrating the contemporary city as it is—in all its noisy, constructed, artificial glory.

This book offers a wealth of interdisciplinary approaches to urbanization strategies in architecture centered on growing concerns about the future of cities and their impacts on essential elements of architectural optimization, livability, energy consumption and sustainability. It portrays the urban condition in architectural terms, as well as the living condition in human terms, both of which can be optimized by mathematical modeling as well as mathematical calculation and assessment. Special features include: • new research on the construction of future cities and smart cities • discussions of sustainability and new technologies designed to advance ideas to future city developments Graduate students and researchers in architecture, engineering, mathematical modeling, and building physics will be engaged by the contributions written by eminent international experts from a variety of disciplines including architecture, engineering, modeling, optimization, and related fields.

This book aims to demonstrate the new awareness concerning the urban environment in Europe. The authors believe that the unlimited outward expansion of our cities must be halted and that we should strive for "inner growth" within urban centres, and for a more human approach to city development. Contact between city dwellers should be encouraged to reduce the isolation of those living in sprawling communities and to remedy the evils resulting from the dispersion of urban functions. To achieve this the book puts forward a number of planning and design criteria which would solve more satisfactorily the problems of housing and living conditions in cities.

The first book-length critical and historical account of an ultramodern architectural movement of the 1960s that advocated "living equipment" instead of buildings. In the 1960s, the architects of Britain's Archigram group and Archigram magazine turned away from conventional architecture to propose cities that move and houses worn like suits of clothes. In drawings inspired by pop art and psychedelia, architecture floated away, tethered by wires, gantries, tubes, and trucks. In Archigram: Architecture without Architecture, Simon Sadler argues that Archigram's sense of fun takes its place beside the other cultural agitants of the 1960s, originating attitudes and techniques that became standard for architects rethinking social space and building technology. The Archigram style was assembled from the Apollo missions, constructivism, biology, manufacturing, electronics, and popular culture, inspiring an architectural movement—High Tech—and influencing the postmodern and deconstructivist trends of the late twentieth century. Although most Archigram projects were at the limits of possibility and remained unbuilt, the six architects at the center of the movement, Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb, became a focal point for the architectural avant-garde, because they redefined the purpose of architecture. Countering the habitual building practice of setting walls and spaces in place, Archigram architects wanted to provide the equipment for amplified living, and they welcomed any cultural rearrangements that would ensue. Archigram: Architecture without Architecture—the first full-length critical and historical account of the Archigram phenomenon—traces Archigram from its rediscovery of early modernist verve through its courting of students, to its ascent to international notoriety for advocating the "disappearance of architecture."

First published in 1990. The options and probabilities for the future of cities are issues of outstanding contemporary importance, both in the developed and developing worlds. The Living City draws together both current mainstream ideas on their futures and various alternative views to enliven the debate and put forward an agenda for sustainable urban development, emphasizing ideas that question the economic imperatives of that development. Certain aspects of city life - the economy of the city, city-countryside relationships, the city as a cultural centre - are selected for study, as the book looks at the historical past and current experiences to speculate on the likely condition of cities in the future. In addition, the book investigates whether the Third World experience of city life is a separate experience or whether there are lessons to be learnt relating to all cities. The book will appeal to professionals in the surveying, planning and architectural fields, as well as students and academics in Planning, Geography, Economics, Architecture, Development Studies and Sociology and anyone interested in issues concerning the city and the environment.

A bold and unprecedented look at a cutting-edge movement in architecture Toward a Living Architecture? is the first book-length critique of the emerging field of generative architecture and its nexus with computation, biology, and complexity. Starting from the assertion that we should take generative architects’ rhetoric of biology and sustainability seriously, Christina Cogdell examines their claims from the standpoints of the sciences they draw on—complex systems theory, evolutionary theory, genetics and epigenetics, and synthetic biology. She reveals significant disconnects while also pointing to approaches and projects with significant potential for further development. Arguing that architectural design today often only masquerades as sustainable, Cogdell demonstrates how the language of some cutting-edge practitioners and educators can mislead students and clients into thinking they are getting something biological when they are not. In a narrative that moves from the computational toward the biological and from current practice to visionary futures, Cogdell uses life-cycle analysis as a baseline for parsing the material, energetic, and pollution differences between different digital and biological design and construction approaches. Contrary to green-tech sustainability advocates, she questions whether quartzite-based silicon technologies and their reliance on rare earth metals as currently designed are sustainable for much longer, challenging common projections of a computationally designed and manufactured future. Moreover, in critiquing contemporary architecture and science from a historical vantage point, she reveals the similarities between eugenic design of the 1930s and the aims of some generative architects and engineering synthetic biologists today. Each chapter addresses a current architectural school or program while also exploring a distinct aspect of the corresponding scientific language, theory, or practice. No other book critiques generative architecture by evaluating its scientific rhetoric and disjunction from actual scientific theory and practice. Based on the author’s years of field research in architecture studios and biological labs, this rare, field-building book does no less than definitively, unsparingly explain the role of the natural sciences within contemporary architecture.