Mobile “Enzymes” of Natural Growth
Humans tend to expand, move, and reallocate ground at speeds unparalleled within the natural world. Our persistent and unpredictable need for space, land, and raw materials causes the original natural environment to diminish, along with its ecosystem of plants and animals. The continuous cycle of removing and reallocating natural space can, in the best case, maintain a certain amount of the “natural environment”, yet it can never maintain the same level of biodiversity that was originally present. Only through fundamental changes in our relationship with nature can we undo the damage done in the past. Company Lijbers Architects (Netherlands), in the framework of “Green Architecture”, organized by the Netherlands Institute of Architecture, offers his view on this issue, based on the complex dynamics of urban development.
PROBLEM DEFINITION
With the aim of the Green Architecture competition to stimulate and collect innovative proposals on how architecture, urban design & planning, and landscape architecture could contribute to maintain and improve our biodiversity, Lijbers Architect looked at the decline of natural biodiversity from the perspective of complex human dynamics. By investigating the organized but fundamentally unpredictable behavior of human systems and its consequences for the natural environment, they find that the highly dynamic reallocation and changing of the earth’s habitat by human action falls short in providing vulnerable species of plants and animals with sufficient time to recover.
It is the responsibility of architects, scientists and alike to create entirely new conceptions of the way people interact with the natural world. One could argue, in line with the reasoning described above, that the problem of biodiversity decline can be reduced to just two main issues; a shortage of space and a lack of time, huge amounts of time. These are the two ingredients that an architectural translation needs to achieve in order to maintain the original level of biodiversity within a natural ecosystem.
ARCHITECTURAL ENTHYMES
The metabolism of an ecosystem is extremely slow when measured on clocks made by man. As such, the pace of evolution and the creation of biodiversity is unable to keep up with the movements of human society. In order to speed up the natural process one would need some sort of catalyst. In biology, enzymes are proteins that catalyze chemical reactions. Almost all chemical reactions in a biological cell need enzymes in order to occur at rates sufficient for life. As a result, products are formed faster and reactions reach their equilibrium state more rapidly. As with all catalysts, enzymes are not consumed by the reactions they catalyze, nor do they alter the equilibrium of these reactions. After the reaction, the enzyme simply returns to its original state waiting to catalyze once more. In order to assist nature in its maintenance and recovery, artificial “enzymes” must be created through an architectural translation. The architectural enzyme should consist of an entity, which would provide a natural ecosystem with all the necessary space and time to evolve and generate biodiversity. The enzyme will not interfere, nor be consumed, but merely facilitate and ensure the chemical processes needed for biodiversity.
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Materials provided by Lijbers Architects