“What if our homes were alive? I don’t mean smart homes with the disembodied voice of Alexa deciding the setting for your living room spotlights. I mean actually alive—growing, living, breathing, and even reproducing. The idea might seem far-fetched, but in the face of a climate crisis, we humans need to think radically about the way we live in and build our environment.
Biology is capable of extraordinary feats of engineering, and the next frontier in building technology might be to make buildings part of nature. Myself and my colleagues at Newcastle and Northumbria universities have set up a new research center to investigate this possibility. Here are five ways we think the buildings of the future might become living, breathing things…”
