#7 - Martyn Dade-Robertson - "Growing Buildings & Designing with Life"

Solarpunk Manifesto

🥼🧪Martyn Dade-Robertson is an architect specializing in design computation and synthetic biology, and Professor of Emerging Technologies at Northumbria University.

🏠Martyn is the co-founder of the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE), a pioneering research centre exploring how living systems and biotechnologies can transform the way we design, construct, and inhabit buildings.

🐛🧫This is the first episode of a series on Biodesign. Biodesign is an innovative, interdisciplinary field where practitioners utilise living biological organisms (like fungi, bacteria, or algae) and processes to create new materials, products, and systems, shifting design from a resource-extractive model to a regenerative one 🪸.

🧬 Here, Martyn & Maxim discuss how synthetic biology in architecture could revolutionise the construction industry, from self-healing concrete and buildings with their own microbiomes, to the possibility of growing furniture or even entire building structures. 🍄‍🟫🌱

While the conversation dives into some technical ideas, it remains accessible to anyone curious about the future of our habitats, and the role biotechnologies could play in it.

Martyn’s book Living Construction: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780429431807/living-construction-martyn-dade-robertson

Instagram - solarpunk.manifesto / Music - @simocellmusic / Editing - Xenia Kuznetsova / Visuals - @louise_mscr @tengtenho_ @via_minhu / Studio - Edouard Picard from @lpiparis

(00:00:19) Martyn's personal journey to Living Construction

(00:02:44) How did you decide to grow stuff instead of build it?

(00:07:45) Is there any interest from the industry in the materials you're trying to synthsie?

(00:12:04) What is biodesign, bio architecture, living architecture?

(00:17:03) How is your approach percieved by collegues from the achitectural side?

(00:26:16) What is an agential material?

(00:29:40) Living materials education

(00:30:21) Teaching Complexity

(00:33:22) Thinking Soils and other projects

(00:37:15) Are these bacterias GMO: ethics, public acceptance, safety ?

(00:39:05) Can we plant a seed and have a building like in sci fi?

(00:43:13) New projects using plants as growing materials

(00:48:10) Bacterial cellulose

(00:51:38) How people will feel inside living buildings?

(00:57:02) The regulations & expectations regarding living material use in construction

Hashtags: #Biotechnology #Biodesign #SyntheticBiology #LivingArchitecutre #Biofutures #HBBE #NewCastleUniversity #Solarpunk #EngineeredLivingMaterials #Sustainability #SustainableArchitecture #Biology #BioArchitecture #Innovation #Biomaterials