This workshop, tutored by Jenny E Sabin, Peter Lloyd Jones, Andrew Lucia and Erica Savig, situates itself at the nexus between architecture and
systems biology to gain insight into dynamic living systems for the
development of novel computational design tools and material systems
that are at once natural and artificial. Generative design techniques
emerge with references to natural systems, not as mimicry but as
trans-disciplinary translation of flexibility, adaptation and
complexity into realms of architectural manifestation. Systems Biology
is a new field that focuses on the systematic study of complex
interactions in biological systems, thereby using a new perspective
(integration instead of reduction) to study them. This approach
examines the nature of nonlinearities, emergent properties and loosely
coupled modules that are cardinal features of 'complexity’. Design
tools found useful in analyzing nonlinear biological systems provide
new models for addressing contextual topics such as performance and
change in architecture.