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Guest-edited by Rachel Armstrong and Richard Beckett

The relationship between architecture and nature stretches back millennia. Today, this relationship is being redefined as the discipline of biodesign seeds a transition toward an adaptive, collaborative approach to architecture that promotes an ethics of co-creation with nature, a politics that embraces marginalized traditions, and an economics grounded in ecological resilience. This issue of Architectural Design A—D traces the evolution of biodesign from speculative metaphor to dynamic design tool and practice, arguing that architecture is undergoing a reorientation toward living systems. Biodesign is no longer confined to laboratories or isolated prototypes; it is entering the public realm, reshaping how environments are imagined, constructed, and inhabited. In this shift, biology is more than a resource to be exploited—it is a collaborator, a model, and a medium.

The contributors to this issue present architecture as a discipline grounded in reciprocity and regeneration. They advance an expanded discourse in which buildings behave as metabolically active systems that grow, digest, adapt, and decay, participating in ecological cycles rather than standing apart from them. This metabolic modality repositions architects as cultivators of biological processes, working with microbial intelligence and regenerative material flows.

These biotic negotiations of matter, energy, and information also explore how biotechnology and computational informatics together enable architectures that learn from and negotiate with living organisms. Here, artificial intelligence acts as an extended autonomic nervous system, embedding learned biological intelligence into materials and systems to produce unscripted, real-time responses. Across these trajectories—in living biocomposites, biodigital platforms, and relational, biotic architectures—the issue proposes that architecture decenters the human and conceives the built environment as indistinguishable from, and accountable to, the living ecologies it sustains.

 CONTRIBUTORS

Rachel Armstrong, Phil Ayres, Richard Beckett, Beatriz Colomina, Marcos Cruz, Jonathan Dessi-Olive, Nancy Diniz, Joyce Hwang, Kyoung Hee Kim, Maria Kuptsova, Mae-ling Lokko, Frank Melendez, Paul Nicholas, Brenda Parker, Claudia Pasquero, Marco Poletto, Ronald Rael, Ehab Sayed, Milad Showkatbakhsh, Neil Spiller, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, Michael Weinstock, and Mark Wigley

FEATURED ORGANIZATIONS AND DESIGNERS

AA Design + Make, Beckett Lab, BIOHM, bioMATTERS, Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA ), ecoLogicStudio, Emerging Technologies (Architectural Association), Regenerative Architecture Arts and Design (RAAD), Studio Biocene, Triennale Milano, and the Venice Architecture Biennale

*30% off through March 31, 2026 (excludes shipping)

Guest-edited by Elena Manferdini and Damjan Jovanovic

What if the most urgent task for architecture today is to reclaim the work of imagining? In a present shaped by predictive models, climate dashboards, and platform logics that cast the future as already known—appearing to foreclose not only the possibility of transformation but the very meaningfulness of pursuing it—this issue of Architectural Design A–D, guest-edited by Elena Manferdini and Damjan Jovanovic, argues for the continued necessity of utopian thinking within and against the systems that constrain us. As we face the multiple urgencies of our capitalist present—and sense the darkening shadows of dystopic futures—the interventions staged in these pages propose not the neat solutions of blueprint utopianism, but strategies that reopen the field of the possible, burnishing our desire for alternatives without prescribing what the future might be. Crucially, this utopian imperative is recast in chimeric terms: as a hybrid, bricolaged, and provisional practice that acknowledges our complex entanglement within the planetary fabric. Running refusal and imagination together, the contributions featured here engage playable simulations, AI-mediated environments, feminist techno-futures, mobile infrastructures, and grassroots “practopias” whose insurgent energies reframe utopia as a shared improvisation in the present. Together, these contributions resist the dual temptations of nostalgic idealism and resigned realism, testing how architecture might negotiate, inhabit, and contest existing systems, bending them toward more enabling, equitable futures. They help us envision utopia not as a closed destination, but as a mode of speculative worldmaking: a living, ongoing process of chimeric invention.

CONTRIBUTORS

Robert Cha, Adil Bokhari, Federico Campagna, Jennifer Chen, John Cooper, Krish Dittmer, Graham Harman, Alina Nazmeeva, Neil Leach, Antoine Picon, Carlo Ratti, Marco Santambrogio, Paulette Singley, Neil Spiller, Andrew Witt, Natasha Wanganeen, and Liam Young

FEATURED ARCHITECTS AND DESIGNERS

Sophia Al-Maria, Archigram, Architectural Association, Atelier Manferdini, AtkinsRéalis, Arthur Becker, Tega Brain, Paolo Canevari, Carlo Ratti Associati, Certain Measures, Nigel Coates, Delugan Meissl Associated Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Peter Eisenman, Buckminster Fuller, Michael Graves, Grymsdyke Farm, Wes Jones, Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vriesendorp, and Zoe Zenghelis, Norman Foster Foundation, Andrea Pozzo, Giulio Romano, Federico Spoltore, Studio Lifeforms, Studio Meteora (ETH Zürich), John Maybury, Jack Oliva-Rendler, Superstudio, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Venice Architecture Biennale, and Rain Wu

Guest-edited by Salmaan Craig, Charles Waldheim, Seok Min Yeo

What happens to architecture and urbanism when they are no longer supercharged by refrigerants and fossil carbon? How might architecture be reshaped by cascading flows of ambient energy, through solar fluxes and thermal gradients, linked to biogenic growing cycles?

This issue of AD examines the relations between three progressive practices that have emerged in contemporary practice over the past decade: critical solar performance, thermal self-regulation, and circular economies of biogenic materials. “The New Heliomorphism” proposes a unifying theory to reconcile the contradictions within and between these distinct modes of spatial projection and their implications for contemporary practice. The edition features contributions from leading voices across three thematic modes of ecologically informed practice—biopolitics and critical solar performance; thermal gradients and thermodynamic sections; biogenic materials after extraction. “The New Heliomorphism examines multiple shared latent tendencies within these ecological practices to propose a general theory of contemporary solar architecture.

CONTRIBUTORS

Inaki Abalos, Michelle Addington, Lola Ben-Alon, Daniel Barber, Paul Bouet, Carl D’Apolito-Dworkin, Kelly Alvarez Doran, Dorit Aviv, Javier Garcia-German, Daniel Ibanez, Aleksandra Jaeschke, Paul Lewis, David J. Lewis, John May, Kiel Moe, Jenny Sabin, Thomas Schröpfer, Renata Sentkiewicz, Marc Tsurumaki, and Emmett Zeifman

COVER

James Turrell
Beneath the Surface, Circular Glass, 2021
LED light, etched glass and shallow space
52-inch diameter, runtime 2 hours and 30 minutes
Courtesy James Turrell Studio and Pace Gallery

Guest-edited by: Hitoshi Abe, ​​Tohru Horiguchi, Shunsuke Kurakata, Osamu Tsukihashi

Since antiquity, Japanese architecture has expressed a profound interdependence with nature. Throughout history, recurring natural disasters have shaped this orientation, compelling architecture to seek not dominance over the environment, but coexistence with it. This issue of AD examines how that sensibility endures today—manifesting in diverse approaches that redefine what it means for architecture to be ecological, responsive, and culturally grounded. Emerging from the dual pressures of environmental volatility and prolonged economic stagnation, contemporary Japanese practice has generated a renewed creativity, one that transforms constraint into invention and reimagines architecture’s pact with the natural world.

CONTRIBUTORS

Jun Aoki, Ryuichi Ashizawa, Shigeru Ban (Text by Souhei Imamura), Sou Fujimoto, Go Hasegawa, Akihisa Hirata, Junya Ishigami (Text by Taro Igarashi), Toyo Ito, Shunsuke Kurakata, Hiroshi Nakamura, Ryue Nishizawa (Text by Yuki Hyakuda), Yasuaki Onoda, Kiyoaki Takeda, Ippei Takahashi, Keisuke Toyoda, Eri Tsugawa, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Shigenori Uoya, Suzuko Yamada