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