Tectónicas do vivo: a integração da biologia em arquitetura

Abstract

The contemporary debate on the integration of biology into architecture tends to be understood through formal metaphors or through the application of botany to façade elements. This dissertation proposes a complementary approach, based on a perspective of a tectonics of the living, understood in terms of material, construction, technique, and the relationship between bodies, systems, and living processes. Drawing on an analogy with bioart, in which bioartists replaced canvases and brushes with Petri dishes and living organisms, it explores an architecture capable of integrating the inherent characteristics of living systems, such as mutation, growth, symbiosis, adaptation, and degradation. The interviews conducted with Alberto T. Estévez, François Roche, Marta de Menezes, Marcos Cruz, and Rachel Armstrong form the basis for a series of essays that intersect the fields of architecture, biology, bioart, and medicine. The interviewees, architects, researchers, professors, and artists, critically engage with the author's proposal for a classification of the modes of integrating biology into architecture: surfaces, materials, or systems. It thus explores an unstable, hybrid, and potentially grotesque tectonics, in which architectural utility expands into broader ecologies that involve human and non-human entities within the same field of material and spatial coexistence.