University of Greenwich leads project to create "living" buildings
The University of Greenwich's School of Architecture & Construction is poised to use ethical synthetic biology to create "living" materials that could be used to clad buildings and help combat the effects of climate change.
Researchers from the University of Greenwich are collaborating with others at the University of Southern Denmark, University of Glasgow and University College London (UCL) to develop materials that could eventually produce water in desert environments or harvest sunlight to produce biofuels.
In collaboration with an architectural practice and a building materials' manufacturer, the idea is to use protocells - bubbles of oil in an aqueous fluid sensitive to light or different chemicals - to fix carbon from the atmosphere or to create a coral-like skin, which could protect buildings.
Professor Neil Spiller, an architect and the new head of the University of Greenwich's School of Architecture & Construction, said the research team was looking at methods of using responsive protocells to clad cities in an ethical, green and sustainable way.
"We want to use ethical synthetic biology to create large-scale, real world applications for buildings," he says.
Protocells made from oil droplets in water allow soluble chemicals to be exchanged between the drops and their surrounding solution.
The Center for Fundamental Living Technology at the University of Southern Denmark has managed to get cells to capture carbon dioxide from solution and convert it into carbon-containing materials. Such cells could be used to fix carbon to create ways of building carbon-negative architecture.
An installation displayed in the Canadian Pavilion in the Venice Biennale 2010, Hylozoic Ground, created by Canadian architect Philip Beesley, provides an example of how protocells may be used to create carbon-negative architectures. Protocells situated within the installation designed by Dr Rachel Armstrong, Teaching Fellow at UCL's Bartlett School of Architecture, recycle carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors into carbon-containing solids. Similar deposits could be used to stabilise the city's foundations by growing an artificial limestone reef beneath it.
"We want to use protocell bubbles to fix carbon or precipitate skin that we can then develop into a coral-like architecture, which could petrify the piles that support Venice to spread the structural weight-load of the city," Professor Spiller said.
Under Professor Spiller's leadership, Greenwich's School of Architecture & Construction is bringing a host of new technologies - such as nano, digital and synthetic biology technologies - into architectural practice.
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Nick Davison
Public Relations
University of Greenwich
020 8331 8092
n.a.p.davison@gre.ac.uk
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Notes:
1. Professor Neil Spiller became head of the University of Greenwich's School of Architecture & Construction on September 1. He was previously Graduate Design Director, Vice Dean and graduate programme director at UCL's Bartlett School of Architecture.
2. The University of Greenwich's School of Architecture & Construction has 65 full time, many part time staff and 3,000 students. It has five departments: Architecture & Urban Design, Public Housing & Urban Regeneration, Construction Management, Landscape Architecture & Garden Design, and Graphic Design & Communication Media. The school is based at Avery Hill, south east London, but a move to a new £70m purpose-built building in central Greenwich is planned.
3. The March issue of the architectural magazine Architectural Design, guest edited by Professor Spiller, is devoted to the subject of protocell architecture.
4. The University of Greenwich is a large university with three campuses - in Greenwich, at the Old Royal Naval College, a World Heritage site; in Avery Hill, south-east London, set among 86 acres of parkland; and in Medway, at an elegant Edwardian red-brick campus in Chatham Maritime. The university is home to a thriving community of more than 26,000 students, one in five of them postgraduate, and combines strong regional, national and international links with a record for excellence in research and a mission for access to higher education.
The university carried out more than £12 million of research and consultancy for companies, research councils and other public and private bodies last year. The quality of the university's research work has been recognised in the award of three Queen's Anniversary Prizes for Higher & Further Education and three recent Times Higher Education awards.
Alongside its major economic, social and cultural contribution, the university prides itself on its high standards of teaching, careers guidance and personal support. The two most recent Sunday Times University Guides have placed Greenwich at the top of the London league table for student satisfaction. In the 2011 Sunday Times Guide, Greenwich was ranked 26th overall for student satisfaction, placing it among the top quarter of all UK universities. Greenwich also topped the publication's national league table for student satisfaction in a variety of subjects including Civil, Chemical and other Engineering courses, Law, and Medical Sciences and Pharmacy. The Sunday Times added that students at the Greenwich campus "have some of the most exquisite university grounds in the country".
People from more than 140 countries choose to study at Greenwich, part of an international student community of 5,000. The university also has an extensive international network of partnerships with universities and overseas colleges.