David Benjamin creates living architecture. And by living architecture we don't just mean green walls. The founding principal of architecture studio The Living has made a 40-foot tower out of fungus bricks; he’s built a living biosensor made of mussels for the Venice architecture biennale; he’s experimented with growing building materials out of bacteria. Now he’s making a living, breathing facade out of glass tanks filled with frogs, algae, and snails.
Called Amphibious Envelope, it’s exactly what it sounds like: A prototype of a building envelope made from glass tanks filled with water and frogs. The frogs have a purpose—we’ll get to that—but first a little primer on glass building facades. Typical glass-enveloped buildings are built from three slabs of glass. In between these panes are cavities that are totally inert and are used to control insulation and light transmission.
For Amphibious Envelope, Benjamin worked with Ali Brivanlou, head of Rockefeller University’s Stem Cell Biology and Molecular Embryology lab, to figure out how they could create a synthetic ecosystem that would mimic the function of a double- or triple-pane window. They wanted to see if they could create insulation, protection, and shading through natural means.
Benjamin and his team are proposing to replace those two inert cavities with living, dynamic ones. The first cavity is filled with air, the second with water, a frog, and food for the frog. These frogs act like biosensors that can track how much oxygen is in the water at any given time. As the tanks lose oxygen, the frogs swim to the surface of the water to grab air and, in doing so, trigger an electronic sensor. These digital sensors pull in air from the outside of the facade and pass it through the water-filled tank where it becomes purified. Once the air bubbles reach the top of the tank, they're pushed up and out of an opening at the top, essentially releasing purified air into the space behind the facade.
Benjamin explains this system has a couple benefits beyond purification. By passing the air pulled in from the outside over water, it creates a natural cooling system. Plus, he adds, “Instead of creating shade and aesthetic pattern through fixed ceramic frits glued onto glass, we create shade and aesthetic pattern through dynamic bubbles.” He compares the bubbles in the water to the effect the enamel dots have on Frank Gehry's IAC building in New York City.
At this point, a fair question to ask is: Why do this at all? If this is more or less the same process you’d get in a traditional building with glass, vents, fans and industrial filtering systems, what’s the value in creating a biological system that achieves the same effect to a presumably less effective degree?
Benjamin responds with his own set of questions: “Why shouldn’t the facades in the city of the future be as responsive and as fluid and as “smart” as our phones and our laptops?” he asks. “Why shouldn’t they communicate information about the environment? Why shouldn’t they breathe and filter the air for us? Why shouldn’t they invite in the natural environment, including marine life? Why shouldn’t they help us navigate trade-offs between competing goals of shading and view, energy-harnessing and air-filtering? And why shouldn’t they make people stop and think and wonder?”
Still, Benjamin says the skepticism is fair. He readily admits that his work is pretty weird when compared to more traditional forms of architecture. But maybe it’s best we recalibrate the way we talk about Benjamin’s and other experimental architects' work. Maybe instead of using experimental as an adjective we use it as a noun. Because really, that's what Amphibious Envelope is—a question and a hypothesis in the form of an architectural prototype.
