“Smart Salad Dressing” Can Save Venice… and the World
The historic city of Venice is
sinking. The world is warming and sea levels are rising. But now a group of scientists and architects are developing an unlikely new technology, which, they claim, can save first Venice… and then the world. They will unveilled their plans at
the launch in London on 26 February of a new initiative called Future Venice (www.futurevenice.org) and at a London Building Centre architecture conference the same day, which explores new ways of turning buildings into living things. The British and Danish-led team behind Future Venice are dubbing their new technology “smart salad dressing”, since, like the stuff you splash on your salad, it consists of olive oil droplets in water. But what makes it “smart” is that the droplets are programmed to transform CO2 rock.
into a limestone-like The net result is the ability to
stop Venice drowning beneath rising sea levels by growing an artificial limestone reef around the city. The new technology is able to turn buildings into living, growing things, able to repair themselves. It offers hope not just to the Venice but to other cities across the world threatened by rising sea levels. The driving force behind Future
Venice, and co-organizer of the accompanying Building Centre architecture conference, is Rachel Armstrong, a British scientist, writer and polymath, who trained as a
doctor but now teaches at University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture. “Future Venice is an initiative for bringing together specialists from diverse fields – including science, architecture, computing and the arts – to find new ways of tackling the environmental and architectural threats to Venice”, says Armstrong. Beyond Venice, the aim is to
turn the same technologies into a new weapon against climate change and rising sea levels worldwide. “The technology we’re talking about will be ready in three to five years”, says Armstrong. Armstrong and colleagues are
working to develop a new approach to architecture, which will enable buildings to become living things, grow their own skins, capture carbon and turn toxic by-products into artificial limestone. “All buildings today have
something in common”, says Armstrong. “They're made using Victorian technologies. This involves blueprints, industrial manufacturing and teams of workers. All this effort results in an inert object. And that means that there is a one-way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities. This is not sustainable. The only way that it is possible for us to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature, not insulating them from it.” Future Venice is pioneering the
new “living architecture” that will make this possible.
At the heart of the new “living
architecture” are “protocells” – small, artificial, olive-oil like cells of fat that can be applied to the surface of a building to form a sort of coating. These protocells are able to capture CO2
and convert it
into solid pearls of artificial limestone or “mock rock”. This frosting of “mock-rock” not just protects the building but even repairs cracks. Protocells are artificial cells that lack DNA but share many of the properties of living cells. In time, they may even be able to replicate like living cells. “A protocell is a little fatty bag”,
says Armstrong. “And it's got a chemical battery in it. This little bag is able to conduct itself in a way that can only be described as living.”
The aim of Armstrong and colleagues is to adapt the protocells for use underwater and so create a mock-rock reef around Venice able to save the city from drowning. “We have already seen the
protocell technology produce limestone shells in the lab. Our efforts in the next few years will be to refine this process to create a system that can exist on the outside of buildings and in watery environments. Ideally, we hope to make a very simple formula that will be freely available to developing countries that can be made as simply as a cooking recipe”. “We are also setting up
processes for bringing the current
15
research to market.” Armstrong’s chief collaborators
on Future Venice are Martin Hanczyc, a chemist from the Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Denmark, and Neil Spiller, Professor of Architecture at University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture. The “living architecture”
approach that Future Venice is suggesting is a radical alternative to the best previous hope for saving Venice. The latter is an ambitious engineering project, using a system of system of 78 steel floodgates. These floodgates will provide a controllable barrier at the lagoon’s edge, so enabling the modulation of the relentless onslaught of the Adriatic Sea. Critics, however, claim that this
large-scale mechanical scheme would have several important drawbacks. “The big idea behind Future
Venice”, says Martin Hanczyc, “is to tackle the threats facing Venice (rising damp and sea levels, subsidence, lagoon-bed erosion) – as a way of bringing together those people who are developing new technology and materials with those who are planning, shaping and dreaming futures for our cities and buildings.” Venice, in short, is the poster child of the new “living architecture” (also known as “grunge architecture”). Today Venice, tomorrow
the world.
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