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What will the city of the future look like? More like an ever-changing and vibrant garden than a static set of buildings and blocks, says British architect Rachel Armstrong.

Armstrong re-imagines the world’s extensive urban areas in Living Architecture and argues that in order to achieve sustainable development of the built environment—and help countries like Japan recover from natural disasters—we need to start building architecture that grows itself.  In Living Architecture, Armstrong sets the scene for fundamentally different ways of making structures and materials, suggesting that we can ‘grow’ more ecologically compatible buildings by using life-like technologies. The result is a new kind of architectural practice where cities behave more like an ecosystems than machines.
 

About the author

Rachel Armstrong is the co-director of AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) specializing in Architecture and Synthetic Biology at the School of Architecture & Construction, University of Greenwich, London.  She is also a Senior TED Fellow and a Visiting Researching Assistant at the Center for Fundamental Living Technology, Department of Physics and Chemistry, University of Southern Denmark. Readers can view Armstrong’s TED Talk on self-repairing architecture HERE.

TED Books is an imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution. Shorter than traditional books, these books run fewer than 20,000 words each – “long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.”

TED Books are available via Amazon.com, Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes and Noble online and are compatible with Kindle, Nook and iBook platforms.  They can be purchased for US$2.99 each. Additionally, membership to TED Live comes with a free one-year subscription to TED Books—allowing the texts to be delivered directly as they are published. Find this book Tuesday plus others at TED.

The tag line - How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives – has sparked my curiosity and imagination.

a TED Books is an imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution. Shorter than traditional books, these books run fewer than 20,000 words each – “long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.”

TED Books are available via Amazon.com, Apple’s iBookstore, Barnes and Noble online and are compatible with Kindle, Nook and iBook platforms.  They can be purchased for US$2.99 each. Additionally, membership to TED Live comes with a free one-year subscription to TED Books—allowing the texts to be delivered directly as they are published. Find this book Tuesday plus others at TED.