New Archetypes is a regular column that explores how architects use modest projects to experiment with new concepts, collaborations, and innovations. These small designs pack a big punch, surpassing the constraints of size, resources, or conventional expectations.
Can we conceive of an architecture where human and environmental impact can be avoided or erased entirely? An architecture that allows us to enter into a system of positive exchange with our environment, where we can benefit from it with out usurping its resources? Such is the aim of New-Territories / M4’s latest architectural initiative ‘MMYST’ (mke_Me_yungR_sheltR_tmptation), a proposal for a residence in Krabi, Thailand, to be constructed out of a biodegradable ‘bio-foam’ with the intention of its demolition after 10 years of use.
© New-Territories / M4
Image courtesy of New-Territories / M4.
The project has no client; rather, it is wholly conceived by partners François Roche and Camille Lacadée, and the fate of its realization is entirely dependent on the outcome of the Kickstarter campaign created with the ambition of funding the project. However, procuring funding for the project is not the sole intention in promoting ‘MMYST’ on Kickstarter. For Roche and Lacadée, it presents an opportunity to engage the public with architectural planning in an unprecedented way, to “open the door to another way for architecture of addressing the multitude, to and through social network,” they tell me … “Architecture used to be a public matter, it became a private discussion (among architects and people ‘authorized to’ talk about it … ). It’s time to change and reopen the debate.”
The ambition to generate a platform for exchange via architecture is a goal that lies central to the project itself and is demonstrated in various modes, from the building’s programmatic intentions to its structure. The project’s site is home to natural swiflet caves, a bird native to Southeast Asia whose nests, made entirely of their own saliva, are in high demand among several populations in Asia for their supposed health benefits. ‘MMYST’ envisions a model of cohabitation, “a Human-Bird Mutualism,” as described on the project’s Kickstarter, between residents of the house and the swiftlets in their natural habitat “for reciprocal benefits.” Visitors are welcome to several nights’ stay in the residence to enjoy the health advantages of the swiftlet “Bird Nest Soup,” which they can receive without disrupting the birds’ natural life cycle.
Top: first for plan; Bottom left: a swiftlet; Bottom center: swiftlet nests; Bottom right: bird soup tasting. Image courtesy of New-Territories / M4.
Whereas the common current conditions of swiftlet farming see the repurposing of buildings intended for human habitation into shelters where the birds are coerced into settling and breeding, ‘MMYST’ proposes a structure that will mimic in both form and material properties of the natural geology of Krabi where swiftlets routinely make their homes.
If realized, the house would be constructed using a ‘bio-foam,’ made out of starch-flax coating a steel frame, which would be applied “with a robotic extruder fixed on a scissor lift.” The foam is meant to “[develop] as a ‘deformation-expansion’ of an existing petrified Lava ‘tongue,’” growing vertically out of the volcanic geography of the surrounding area, the Kickstarter explains. The three-story house’s irregular and bulbous form “is a consequence of this tension, between living spaces and geology.”
Top left: natural geology of the site; Top right: 3D-printed prototype; Bottom: ‘Lava Skin’ / Robot on scissor crane. Images courtesy of New-Territories / M4.
This attempt to crystallize a moment of tension between opposing forces permeates all areas of the project, particularly in its examination of the negotiation between the inevitability of the force of human technological advancements coupled with our growing concerns over environmental impact. According to Roche and Lacadée, in this current period of rapid technological development, “we are pulled and pushed in a contradictory mode of exchanges” in which we are “condemned now to evolve in the … evolutionary period, in a thermodynamic flux, unstable and improbable.” How, then, can we utilize our inexorable engagement with technology to generate a mutually reciprocal mode of living with our environment?
Robotic – BioPlatic (Starch); image courtesy of New-Territories / M4.
For Roche and Lacadée, the bio-foam, developed in a series of experiments by the New-Territories / M4 team with the Louisiana Museum, presents one such possibility. A biomaterial concocted via scientific investigation and applied via robotic-fabrication but which can completely decompose. The building’s planned demolition after 10 years of use is the team’s “way to limit the impact of the experimentation.”
Establishing this shared space between human and birds enforces another point of tension that the duo hopes to explore with this project, surrounding questions of authenticity and the aesthetics of sustainability practices. ‘MMYST’ aims to function as “an abstraction for gentrification and [the] carnival of eco-consciousness,” suggesting that the form of our measures for sustainability often obscure our attainment of a viable and truly mutual exchange of resources with the environment.
Morphogenesis; image courtesy of New-Territories / M4.
Roche and Lacadée propose that we must “become skeptical about the greenish entertainment,” to embrace that which may not be conventionally beautiful, such as the consumption of swiftlet bird saliva or vacationing in a lava tongue, but that which may be the most beneficial to humans and the natural environment, to engage within “a paradox of taste and appearance.”
While Roche and Lacadée rather soberly admit that they do not expect the project to come to fruition, they hope the project brief will serve as an architectural provocation, as “a vector of possible transformation, adaptation, conflict,” one that is open to interpretation and free from predetermined hypotheses. Via new methods of public sharing and positive cohabitation, New-Territories / M4 proposes “a starting point … to reconsider commissioning … and exchanges,” to come closer to engaging and accommodating all components of the natural world.
**As of 10/26/15, ‘MMYST’ did not reach its project goal on Kickstarter.