H is for Habitat
Moving forward, we should think about habitats as organisms. Because in the future, architecture will be programmable. It will morph, respond, and feed-in-and-out like real creatures. The emergence of ecological systems thinking, combined with information technologies, calls for living shelter. Adaptive, semi-permeable materials that respond like sensitive skins. Pro-active buildings that can change shape real-time in relation to the sun. Housing that can breathe, harnessing the power of the wind. As architecture becomes an integrative part of nature, we will begin to see houses not as “containers,” but as complex, self-organizing living systems. And as we increasingly move off-planet, our days of man-in-the-can ventures into the sky and space pod living will be over. We will engineer our biosphere in the stars and create greenhouses 100 feet high so that people and animals can walk right in. Inextricably linked to our new intergalactic terraform, replanted and original.