Biodesign is reshaping a millennia-old relationship between architecture and nature, shifting the field toward adaptive, collaborative modes of practice grounded in reciprocity and ecological responsibility. This issue of Architectural Design traces that shift from speculative metaphor to an operational design framework, arguing that architecture is undergoing a fundamental reorientation around living systems.
Here, biology becomes collaborator, model and medium, rather than a passive resource to be extracted. Contributors propose an architecture that behaves metabolically—growing, digesting, adapting and decaying in concert with ecological cycles—positioning architects as cultivators of biological processes and regenerative material flows. Across living biocomposites, biodigital platforms and relational, biotic . . . .go to book page >>

Fifty years ago, architects imagined worlds to come. Today, many have ceded the future to market logic, treating global capitalism as inevitable and reality as fixed. This issue of Architectural Design argues that when collective imagination falters, the utopian impulse returns—not as a blueprint for perfection, but as a vital means of reopening what can still be conceived and made. As planetary computation, climate instability and synthetic cognition converge, utopia becomes a tool for speculative world?building: a way to design new systems, realities and relationalities with the more-than-human. Contributors navigate this shifting terrain from a range of vantages—from those who . . . .go to book page >>

How might architecture be reshaped by cascading flows of ambient energy, through solar fluxes and thermal gradients, linked to biogenic growing cycles? This issue of Architectural Design examines the relations among three progressive practices that have emerged in contemporary architecture over the past decade: critical solar performance, thermal self-regulation and circular economies of biogenic materials. The New Heliomorphism proposes a unifying theory to reconcile the contradictions within and between these distinct modes of spatial projection and their implications for contemporary practice. The issue features contributions from leading voices across three thematic modes of ecologically informed practice: biopolitics and critical solar . . . .go to book page >>

Since antiquity, Japanese architecture has expressed an interdependence with nature, understood both as the living environment and as the expressive character of an aesthetic rooted in tradition yet attuned to a spectrum ranging from the quiet beauty of impermanence and the exuberance that change can bring. Recurring natural disasters have shaped this orientation, compelling architects to seek not dominance over their surroundings but forms of coexistence that accept contingency as a fundamental condition. This issue of Architectural Design examines how that sensibility endures today, manifesting in diverse approaches that redefine what it means for architecture to be ecological, responsive and . . . .go to book page >>