gestaltung der wände im flur
two twin domes, two radically opposed design cultures. one is made of thousands of steel parts, the other of a single silk thread. one is synthetic, the other organic. one is imposed on the environment, the other creates it. one is designed for nature,the other is designed by her. michelangelo said thatwhen he looked at raw marble,
he saw a figure struggling to be free. the chisel was michelangelo's only tool. but living things are not chiseled. they grow. and in our smallest units of life,our cells, we carry all the information that's required for every other cellto function and to replicate. tools also have consequences. at least since the industrial revolution,the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturingand mass production.
assembly lines have dictateda world made of parts, framing the imaginationof designers and architects who have been trained to thinkabout their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions. but you don't find homogenousmaterial assemblies in nature. take human skin, for example. our facial skins are thinwith large pores. our back skins are thicker,with small pores. one acts mainly as filter,
the other mainly as barrier, and yet it's the same skin:no parts, no assemblies. it's a system that graduallyvaries its functionality by varying elasticity. so here this is a split screento represent my split world view, the split personality of every designerand architect operating today between the chisel and the gene, between machine and organism,between assembly and growth, between henry ford and charles darwin.
these two worldviews,my left brain and right brain, analysis and synthesis, will play outon the two screens behind me. my work, at its simplest level, is about uniting these two worldviews, moving away from assembly and closer into growth. you're probably asking yourselves: why now? why was this not possible 10or even five years ago?
we live in a very special time in history, a rare time, a time when the confluence of four fieldsis giving designers access to tools we've never had access to before. these fields are computational design, allowing us to designcomplex forms with simple code; additive manufacturing,letting us produce parts by adding materialrather than carving it out; materials engineering, which lets usdesign the behavior of materials
in high resolution; and synthetic biology, enabling us to design new biologicalfunctionality by editing dna. and at the intersectionof these four fields, my team and i create. please meet the minds and hands of my students. we design objects and productsand structures and tools across scales, from the large-scale,
like this robotic armwith an 80-foot diameter reach with a vehicular base that willone day soon print entire buildings, to nanoscale graphics made entirelyof genetically engineered microorganisms that glow in the dark. here we've reimagined the mashrabiya, an archetype of ancientarabic architecture, and created a screen whereevery aperture is uniquely sized to shape the form of light and heatmoving through it. in our next project,
we explore the possibilityof creating a cape and skirt -- this was for a paris fashion showwith iris van herpen -- like a second skinthat are made of a single part, stiff at the contours,flexible around the waist. together with my long-term3d printing collaborator stratasys, we 3d-printed this cape and skirtwith no seams between the cells, and i'll show more objects like it. this helmet combinesstiff and soft materials in 20-micron resolution.
this is the resolution of a human hair. it's also the resolution of a ct scanner. that designers have access to such high-resolutionanalytic and synthetic tools, enables to design products that fitnot only the shape of our bodies, but also the physiologicalmakeup of our tissues. next, we designed an acoustic chair, a chair that would be at oncestructural, comfortable and would also absorb sound.
professor carter, my collaborator, and iturned to nature for inspiration, and by designing this irregularsurface pattern, it becomes sound-absorbent. we printed its surfaceout of 44 different properties, varying in rigidity, opacity and color, corresponding to pressure pointson the human body. its surface, as in nature,varies its functionality not by adding another materialor another assembly, but by continuously and delicatelyvarying material property.
but is nature ideal? are there no parts in nature? i wasn't raisedin a religious jewish home, but when i was young, my grandmother used to tell mestories from the hebrew bible, and one of them stuck with me and cameto define much of what i care about. as she recounts: "on the third day of creation,god commands the earth to grow a fruit-bearing fruit tree."
for this first fruit tree,there was to be no differentiation between trunk, branches,leaves and fruit. the whole tree was a fruit. instead, the land grew treesthat have bark and stems and flowers. the land created a world made of parts. i often ask myself, "what would design be likeif objects were made of a single part? would we return to a betterstate of creation?" so we looked for that biblical material,
that fruit-bearing fruit treekind of material, and we found it. the second-most abundant biopolymeron the planet is called chitin, and some 100 million tons of itare produced every year by organisms such as shrimps,crabs, scorpions and butterflies. we thought if we could tuneits properties, we could generate structuresthat are multifunctional out of a single part. so that's what we did. we called legal seafood --
(laughter) we ordered a bunch of shrimp shells, we grinded themand we produced chitosan paste. by varying chemical concentrations, we were able to achievea wide array of properties -- from dark, stiff and opaque, to light, soft and transparent. in order to print the structuresin large scale, we built a robotically controlledextrusion system with multiple nozzles.
the robot would varymaterial properties on the fly and create these 12-foot-long structuresmade of a single material, 100 percent recyclable. when the parts are ready,they're left to dry and find a form naturallyupon contact with air. so why are we stilldesigning with plastics? the air bubbles that were a byproductof the printing process were used to containphotosynthetic microorganisms that first appeared on our planet3.5 billion year ago,
as we learned yesterday. together with our collaboratorsat harvard and mit, we embedded bacteriathat were genetically engineered to rapidly capture carbonfrom the atmosphere and convert it into sugar. for the first time, we were able to generate structuresthat would seamlessly transition from beam to mesh, and if scaled even larger, to windows.
a fruit-bearing fruit tree. working with an ancient material, one of the first lifeforms on the planet, plenty of water and a little bitof synthetic biology, we were able to transform a structuremade of shrimp shells into an architecturethat behaves like a tree. and here's the best part: for objects designed to biodegrade, put them in the sea,and they will nourish marine life;
place them in soil,and they will help grow a tree. the setting for our next explorationusing the same design principles was the solar system. we looked for the possibilityof creating life-sustaining clothing for interplanetary voyages. to do that, we needed to contain bacteriaand be able to control their flow. so like the periodic table, we came upwith our own table of the elements: new lifeforms thatwere computationally grown, additively manufactured
and biologically augmented. i like to think of synthetic biologyas liquid alchemy, only instead of transmutingprecious metals, you're synthesizing new biologicalfunctionality inside very small channels. it's called microfluidics. we 3d-printed our own channelsin order to control the flow of these liquid bacterial cultures. in our first piece of clothing,we combined two microorganisms. the first is cyanobacteria.
it lives in our oceansand in freshwater ponds. and the second, e. coli, the bacteriumthat inhabits the human gut. one converts light into sugar,the other consumes that sugar and produces biofuelsuseful for the built environment. now, these two microorganismsnever interact in nature. in fact, they never met each other. they've been here,engineered for the first time, to have a relationshipinside a piece of clothing. think of it as evolutionnot by natural selection,
but evolution by design. in order to contain these relationships, we've created a single channelthat resembles the digestive tract, that will help flow these bacteriaand alter their function along the way. we then started growingthese channels on the human body, varying material propertiesaccording to the desired functionality. where we wanted more photosynthesis,we would design more transparent channels. this wearable digestive system,when it's stretched end to end, spans 60 meters.
this is half the lengthof a football field, and 10 times as longas our small intestines. and here it is for the first timeunveiled at ted -- our first photosynthetic wearable, liquid channels glowing with lifeinside a wearable clothing. (applause) thank you. mary shelley said, "we are unfashionedcreatures, but only half made up." what if design could providethat other half?
what if we could create structuresthat would augment living matter? what if we could createpersonal microbiomes that would scan our skins,repair damaged tissue and sustain our bodies? think of this as a form of edited biology. this entire collection, wanderers,that was named after planets, was not to me really about fashion per se, but it provided an opportunityto speculate about the future of our race on our planet and beyond,
to combine scientific insightwith lots of mystery and to move awayfrom the age of the machine to a new age of symbiosisbetween our bodies, the microorganisms that we inhabit, our products and even our buildings. i call this material ecology. to do this, we always needto return back to nature. by now, you know that a 3d printerprints material in layers. you also know that nature doesn't.
it grows. it adds with sophistication. this silkworm cocoon, for example, creates a highlysophisticated architecture, a home inside which to metamorphisize. no additive manufacturing today gets evenclose to this level of sophistication. it does so by combining not two materials, but two proteinsin different concentrations. one acts as the structure,the other is the glue, or the matrix, holding those fibers together.
and this happens across scales. the silkworm first attaches itselfto the environment -- it creates a tensile structure -- and it then starts spinninga compressive cocoon. tension and compression,the two forces of life, manifested in a single material. in order to better understandhow this complex process works, we glued a tiny earth magnet to the head of a silkworm,to the spinneret.
we placed it inside a boxwith magnetic sensors, and that allowed us to createthis 3-dimensional point cloud and visualize the complex architectureof the silkworm cocoon. however, when we placedthe silkworm on a flat patch, not inside a box, we realized it would spin a flat cocoon and it would stillhealthily metamorphisize. so we started designing differentenvironments, different scaffolds, and we discovered thatthe shape, the composition,
the structure of the cocoon, was directlyinformed by the environment. silkworms are often boiled to deathinside their cocoons, their silk unraveled and usedin the textile industry. we realized that designing these templatesallowed us to give shape to raw silk without boiling a single cocoon. they would healthily metamorphisize, and we would be ableto create these things. so we scaled this process upto architectural scale. we had a robot spinthe template out of silk,
and we placed it on our site. we knew silkworms migratedtoward darker and colder areas, so we used a sun path diagramto reveal the distribution of light and heat on our structure. we then created holes, or apertures, that would lock in the raysof light and heat, distributing those silkwormson the structure. we were ready to receive the caterpillars. we ordered 6,500 silkwormsfrom an online silk farm.
and after four weeks of feeding,they were ready to spin with us. we placed them carefullyat the bottom rim of the scaffold, and as they spin they pupate,they mate, they lay eggs, and life begins all over again --just like us but much, much shorter. bucky fuller said that tensionis the great integrity, and he was right. as they spin biological silkover robotically spun silk, they give this entirepavilion its integrity. and over two to three weeks,
6,500 silkworms spin 6,500 kilometers. in a curious symmetry, this is alsothe length of the silk road. the moths, after they hatch,produce 1.5 million eggs. this could be used for 250additional pavilions for the future. so here they are, the two worldviews. one spins silk out of a robotic arm, the other fills in the gaps. if the final frontier of designis to breathe life into the products and the buildings around us,
to form a two-material ecology, then designers must unitethese two worldviews. which brings us back, of course,to the beginning. here's to a new age of design,a new age of creation, that takes us froma nature-inspired design to a design-inspired nature, and that demands of us for the first time that we mother nature. thank you very much. thank you.