Essay

Why does inspiration strike when thinking about building design in terms of a convergent assembly of elements? Well, here is an explanation about just what a “convergent assembly” means for manufacturing at the molecular level.

Today's manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. […] One robotic arm assembling molecular parts is going to take a long time to assemble anything large — so we need lots of robotic arms: this is what we mean by massive parallelism. While earlier proposals achieved massive parallelism through self replication, today’s “best guess” is that future molecular manufacturing systems will use some form of convergent assembly. In this process vast numbers of small parts are assembled by vast numbers of small robotic arms into larger parts, those larger parts are assembled by larger robotic arms into still larger parts, and so forth. If the size of the parts doubles at each iteration, we can go from one nanometer parts (a few atoms in size) to one meter parts (almost as big as a person) in only 30 steps.

– zyvex.com, Introduction to the Core Concepts of Molecular Nanotechnology

The Future of Scalability in Architecture

As if to build upward from some sort of DNA structure, building an assembly of parts at smaller scales then fitting that assembly within a larger assembly give should give you “food for thought”.

What if, as an architect, you could design a sort of “DNA seed” from which your buildings would grow, not only as they are built, but also as they age over time? Could your initial design “seed” create a better outcome for your building during it’s use — especially in its later years? Well, this “seed” approach definitely calls for designing a building system with a different design mindset — a sort of “genetic” approach to design execution.

In other words, your notion of “scalability” would directly impact your final product, which would be more of a real-time rule-based system. It would be an architecture that appears to grow. Certainly different from the architecture we see today.

I challenge you to think of your building’s system in a slightly different way. In the future, it will be more than just a system made up of parts that come together at scales that you can easily “see” in one glimpse, but as a system with the power to mold itself into an almost infinite array of possibilities — but where your design vision sets its inherent order. Hence, I am speaking of a more adaptive building system approach.

But still, today we typically build a “what you see, is what you get” architecture. Instead, I see that we are at the advent of having more “genetic” building systems.

Building and assembling at the molecular level certainly brings with it some challenges, especially as the iterative process of scaling the manufacturing process upward needs to be resolved. Similarly, architects must work to design their building system from extreme detail to the scale that encompasses global and cultural concerns.

Nevertheless, your building sits upon your design ideas as it reacts to its own surrounding environment. Your design vision and execution becomes your building’s fingerprint from which it adapts, behaves and stands strong.

Image Caption: Individual atoms in a 90 nanometer scoop of Nitinol.

Image Credit: © jurvetson | Flickr