AVAILIABLE RESOURCES

It struck me that our scheme is somewhat like the idea of the living machine except instead of a mass of complex plant life, each component of our building acts like one of those plants, harvesting its part of the energy/resource and passing it on to the next in line. Wiki has an article on how living machines work, which is worth at least a perusal.

(image: mygiantrobot.com)

It also reminds me of that Le Corbusier quote "..a machine for living in.." I think the more we think of buildings as living breathing organisms or at least organism-like object the easier it is to design in the way we hypothesized.

It' s hard to find a carbon neutral solution to a carbon-breathing object if we think of it as an unmovable, unchangeable rock, the inevitable solution to that always being.. "throw it out and start again", which, isn't a viable solution if we're trying to be sufficient/sustainable. Perhaps if we investigate the design as a system of organs working together for a central purpose we may have more luck.

Our system is a lot like a living system in a way as each component can't really survive without the other, but I like that it also has a parasitic quality to it as well. It easy to think of the parasite as a needless object but it's also possible to imagine situations where the person with the parasite benefits as much as the parasitic organism does. That is, perhaps, what makes our proposal the most interesting, it gives as much (maybe more) than it takes, which seems like its the guiding principle of self-sustaining buildings.


More giant robots less Cutler and I think we'll have something that shows sustainable design doesn't have to be soul-suckingly bad boring.