New Noospheres: Metastable Architecture | Philip Beesley

N2 Conference 2023 University of California, Berkeley Philip Beesley presents: New Noospheres: Metastable Architecture This talk will explore a design manifesto that is devoted to open involvement within immersive environments. The presentation will include detailed examples from Philip Beesley and his collaborators within the Living Architecture Systems Group. We are surrounded by rigid wall-building. Hardened crusts lie all around our built environment. Metabolites and tars and shells and crystals harden within radiant burning energy, the materials of skeletons and shells and anchors within our world stage. A hollow and brittle equilibrium of crystal shards create walled communities and crystalline, vitrified, calcified cores. When out-of-control natural and social environments cause pressure on human activities, it seems inevitable to harden and seal our spaces - to keep the world out, in order to maintain safety and security within our own private, controlled ecosystems. Yet hardened walls can create turbulence that ultimately creates even more insecurity, both inside and outside. The need for security and the need for open sanctuaries might seem to be ultimate contradictions. How can we live together? Can architectural forms balance a deeply stressed environment and increasingly strained natural and social reactions? If designs are configured for uncertain conditions where acquiring and shedding heat play in uneven cycles, they could follow a common language of radical exfoliation. Diffusive form-language seen in reticulated snowflakes, heat sinks and the microscopic manifolds of mitochondria offer an alternate optimum to the perfect geometries of Plato’s ‘original’ space. Writ large, these forms speak of involvement with the world. The mid-20th century visions of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Ilya Prigogine play pivotal roles in framing this architectural conversation. Belgian chemist and physicist Prigogine's 1978 Nobel Prize-winning research on dissipative structures introduced entropy's fertile and dynamic function within living systems. Teilhard's expression of the 'prodigious sympathy' of collective consciousness is interwoven within this physical vision. 'Metastable' conditions, delicate conscious dances between order and chaos evoked by both Teilhard and Prigogine, can be seen in the sculpture and architecture illustrated within this talk. Learn more at https://www.humanenergy.io