Mae-ling LokkoHealing Meadow, installation view, Z33, Hasselt, 2021.
Photo: Selma Gurbuz, courtesy of the artist

Living Architecture

From the dawn of constructive thought, conceptive intelligence has aspired to develop architecture capable of adapting and evolving according to the vicissitudes of time and societal transformations. Architects in the Metabolist movement,¹ 1 - For an oral history of the movement, see Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks… (Cologne: Taschen, 2011). which was born in post-war Japan, conceptualized “organic” megastructures² 2 - The term “megastructure” was coined by Fumihiko Maki. See Fumihiko Maki, “Investigations in Collective Form” [1964], in Nuturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City, ed. Mark Mulligan (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2008), 44–66. that were meant to grow and regenerate through the ages, following a logic inspired by biological systems applied to advanced technology.

However, although this visionary principle theorized a potentially infinite expansion, enabling additions to a constructed whole and replacement of its modular and prefabricated components (as with a space station), it never addressed its contraction and eventual disappearance. This conceptual asymmetry favours growth and neglects cycles of decomposition and the natural limits of the organic systems the movement claims to emulate.

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