Living architecture: workshop report from the European Conference on Artificial Life, Lyon, France, 4 September 2017

Imagine evolving swarms of robots interacting and by doing so reshaping and cultivating our habitat. This habitat could be here on Earth, on a distant planet or moon, or within a self-contained spacecraft. What would these robots look like and made of what type of material? What kind of information, hardware or software? What are the architectural necessities? There are many open questions when trying to envision the future of architecture; but, in this particular workshop, the goal was not only to imagine the future but also to create it. With this particular goal in mind, the Living Architecture workshop at European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL) 2017 brought together practitioners from the sciences and architecture to share ideas and technologies to examine possible paths forward. Living Architecture is a specific substantiation of the broader notion of Living Technology where living systems or artificial systems with life-like properties are developed towards technological applications. In Living Architecture, objects designed in the built environment would contain living systems as part of their functionality (such as bioreactors for energy) or artificial distributed systems with feedback loops (such as neural networks or artificial intelligence). In this way, Living Architecture represents a congruence in functionality and form between living systems, technology and architecture