This friday the theme of NEXT will be Green, one of the keynote speakers I'm very much looking forward to hearing, is TED fellow Rachel Armstrong. To give you (and myself) a little preview, here's Rachel talking on architecture and sustainability. Victorian architecture as we know it imposes structure uppon matter, in other words, architecture isn't part of nature but has to take matter out of nature in order to exist. This isn't very sustainable. Rachel proposes using bottom-up methods in future architecture. By adding certain kind of (non living) metabolic materials to a normal block of limestone, this building block might be able to attain properties that will allow it to converse with nature. "Maybe they could extract carbon dioxide [..], it might be able to grow, it might be able to self repair and even respond to dramatic changes in the immediate environment." according to Rachel.



"Venice is sinking. To save it, Rachel Armstrong says we need to outgrow architecture made of inert materials and, well, make architecture that grows itself. She proposes a not-quite-alive material that does its own repairs and sequesters carbon, too."

Via TED