Nanoarchitectures: The Synthetic Design of Extensions and Thoughts

Abstract

The architecture of the future will not simply substitute the natural properties of the environment with a software modelling of matter, but, more radically, will strive to reprogram space as a synthetic environment growing anew from the nanoscale of matter. In 1959, the physicist Richard Feynman already envisaged that material stuff could be redesigned starting from its atomic architecture (Feynman, 1959). In his famous talk entitled ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’, he stated that there was no principle in physics that could prevent the rearrangement of atoms. Much later, in The Engines of Creation, Drexler (1986) explained that with the atom-by-atom structuring of matter, it was possible to design molecular machines that could reproduce themselves at incrementally smaller scale.

An ideal architecture is one that you can plant as a seed having programmed it with all the information it needs to grow itself in an environment where it can organically seek out and connect with the resources it needs. […] The architecture would be able to reproduce by cloning itself using a germline structure that offers humans an opportunity to make necessary genetic adjustments. […] The end of the lifecycle of the architecture would come when it is no longer responsive to human activity … possibly decaying in the ecosystem to be recycled by its progeny.

(Armstrong, 2008).