The Smithsonian Institution

From BioArt to BioDesign

Author(s): Christina Cogdell
Source: American Art, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer 2011), pp. 25-29
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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 2 These details of the traveling exhibition of the Broadacre City Model come from MS 2401.164, made
in 1935 in preparation for publication in issues of his magazine, Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright Archives,
Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Ariz.

3 “Architect Models New Type of City,” New York Times, March 27, 1935, 16.

4 John Sergeant, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Houses: The Case for Organic Architecture (New York:
Whitney Library of Design, 1976), 123.

5 Stephen Alexander, New Masses 15 (June 18, 1935): 28.

6 Frank Lloyd Wright, “Freedom Based on Form,” New Masses 16 (July 23, 1935): 23–24.

7 Wright’s typescript text for radio is dated April 15, 1935. A copy is in MS 2401.163, 8, Frank Lloyd
Wright Archives.

8 See Walter Creese, The Crowning of the American Landscape: Eight Great Spaces and Their Buildings
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), 271–72.

9 Roy Kantorowich, “Architectural Utopias: The City Planning Theories of Frank Lloyd Wright and
Le Corbusier,” Task 2 (1941): 30–35, quotations at 31.

Christina Cogdell From BioArt to BioDesign

What if Chicago-based bioartist Eduardo Kac’s Alba, a rabbit made of a genetically

engineered green-fluorescing protein, were not a bunny but a furry room—say, your
bedroom—designed by the Spanish “genetic architect” Alberto Estévez? Walls of
“whatever forms, textures, and colors one may choose,” with “very long, silky hair in
bright silver shades or in iridescent red,” would be “accomplished without sacrificing
any animal—just the opposite, by creating the animal!” Estévez explains, “There will
be no need for painting and repainting the walls,” and then asks in a recent essay, “Pure
utopia or near reality?” His writing and lectures put forward his clear belief that genetic
architecture is both.1
Dream even bigger, as New York–based architects Matthias Hollwich and Marc
Kushner have done in their video Econic Design (2008). They imagine how genetic
engineering technologies, applied to rapacious kudzu vines, might capture energy
from photosynthesis and allow cities like Atlanta to move off the grid in the twenty-
second century. This city of the future, which they call MEtreePOLIS, is so far off
the grid that our rectangular urban infrastructure of skyscrapers and streets is pulled
apart and replaced by a very ungridlike “biogrid.”2 The vines function simultane-
ously as energy source, urban playscape, and social unifier. “No longer . . . segregated
urban and suburban enclaves,” nor a “city of simple above and below,” the biogrid
permeates these previously distinct zones and empowers “citizens to reclaim the
urban scene in its entirety.” Econic Design dramatizes how “technology becomes
nature,” yet in so doing obliterates nature as we know and experience it today.
Nongenetically engineered plants such as trees and grass disappear at the onset of
the genetically altered kudzu and “enhanced bio-renewable moss,” the latter of which
effectively turns the concrete jungle into a park where podcars zoom amid strolling
pedestrians.3

25 American Art Volume 25, Number 2 © 2011 Smithsonian Institution

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 MEtreePOLIS, from Matthias
Hollwich and Marc Kushner,
Econic Design, 2008. Photo,
Hollwich Kushner LLC
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Hollwich and Kushner state with matter-of-fact irony their rationale for turning to
genetic technologies to solve the current energy crisis. “The destruction of the world’s
ecosystem and the imminent end of modern society as we know it is a foregone conclu-
sion. . . . Melting ice-caps will not change human nature and environmental sensitivity
will persist to be subservient to the thrill of short-term returns,” they write. Yet “there
is good reason to believe that the human tendency for environmental manipulation
will ultimately bring ecological salvation.” Without clarifying those good reasons, they
extend their techno-optimism into the social realm: “Our compulsion for more control
and better innovation suggests a future within which selfish shortsightedness inadver-
tently triggers an ecological and social utopia.”4
Hollwich told me about meeting genomics researcher Craig Venter—cofounder
and CEO of the company Synthetic Genomics—at a 2008 conference in California.5
Venter is currently working on patenting a versatile synthetic genome, whose lengthy
amino acid sequence was first created on a computer, then assembled at a biotechnol-
ogy company that synthesizes DNA, and finally inserted into a bacterial cell in May
2010. The cell accepted the genome and began producing the proteins coded for by
the synthetic genome.6 Venter’s accomplishment—not of creating life, only mimicking
it—far surpasses that of CalTech computer scientist and bioengineer Paul Rothemund,
whose DNA Origami (2004–5) models were on display at the Museum of Modern
Art, New York (MoMA), in 2008 in the exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind.
Rothemund also used computers to design DNA strands that, when synthesized and
placed in a test tube of saltwater, chemically bonded at predetermined points with a
strand of viral DNA to “self-assemble” into nano happy faces (likely meant to assuage
any fears viewers might have).7 Inclusion in the exhibition was surely not for this blasé
artistic result but rather for Rothemund’s highly suggestive technological process,
which curator Paola Antonelli’s wall text stated could “come together in dynamic
objects and buildings.”
Just six years after Rothemund made his happy faces, Venter showed that this latter
process can produce synthetic bioproducts, and schools of architecture and design
are encouraging students to explore the trend toward “semi-living architecture.”
Rothemund had stated his overarching goal in a 2007 talk called “Casting Spells with
DNA.” “What we really want to do in the end is learn how to program self-assembly
so that we can build anything, right? We want to be able to build technological arti-
facts that are maybe good for the world,” he asserted. “We want to learn how to build
biological artifacts, like people and whales and trees, and if it’s the case that we can
reach that level of complexity, if our ability to program molecules gets to be that good,
then that will truly be magic.”8 His process and vision resemble those of Estévez, who
defines genetic architecture as “the fusion of cybernetic-digital resources with genetics,
to continuously join the zeros and ones from the architectural [computer] drawing
with those from the robotized manipulation of DNA.”9
26 Summer 2011
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Estévez is not a scientist, nor is he seriously collaborating with a geneticist or bio-
engineer on working through the fantastic difficulties of his mission, were real cells
and tissues actually to become involved. He and several colleagues point to the work
of Australian artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr as living prototypes for what genetic
architecture will be, despite the fact that the artists’ intentions run counter to the
architects’ goals.10
Catts and Zurr’s Victimless Leather, also on display at Design and the Elastic Mind,
was a “semi-living” miniature coat about two inches tall, grown in vitro through
tissue-engineering processes and kept alive for about five weeks at MoMA with bio-
nutrient fluid and a peristaltic pump. A biodegradable polymer scaffold in the shape
of the stylish jacket was created by the artists and seeded with connective and bone
cells from a mouse, which grew over the scaffold and then continued beyond until one
arm was almost falling off and the incubator was clogged. Curator Antonelli deemed
these traits worthy of death; with the artists’ permission, she ceremoniously acted as
executioner.11
In the caption at MoMA, the artists were quoted as stating that if we consumers
surround ourselves with “manufactured and living, growing entities,” we will “begin
to take a more responsible attitude toward our environment and curb our destructive
consumerism.”12 Ponder the implications of that statement as though you are part
of an ongoing performance piece Catts and Zurr are initiating, and which Antonelli
presented at face value to viewers in the context of her exhibition. Would you buy
such a coat for your newborn and simply grow the coat along with your child, so that
only one coat is needed for life? Would the coat have a portable IV system that slips
into a waterproof liner pocket when you wear it outside, assuming it is plugged in
all the time at home? Could you purchase health insurance or a fifty-year warranty
that allows annual stylish alterations at the “genetic design laboratory”? What would
this cost?
Coats, wallcoverings, houses, cities: perhaps you will immediately invest in one of
the companies that produces tissue culture media, the bionutrient fluid that keeps
such products alive. But don’t look past the sterile tubes and glass vial interiors,
for they form tissue-engineered biodesign’s necessary contextual infrastructure. For
MEtreePOLIS, Atlanta’s city council might decide it needs a sterile terrorist-proof
glass dome over the city, such as Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao proposed for
Manhattan about 1960. Also, don’t presume that biodesigns will be made of “victim-
less leather,” for although the life and death of connective and bone cells of a mouse
on a polymer scaffold may not cause you to lose sleep, the integral red fluid that keeps
tissue-engineered entities alive is made in part from the serum of a calf fetus. Tissue
culture media usually consists of 10 percent fetal calf serum, a much more sensi-
tive issue, since mother and calf must die at the slaughterhouse to obtain it.13 Even
for genetically engineered bioproducts, problems of nutrient supply, waste removal,

27 American Art

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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Oron Catts and Jonat Zurr,
Victimless Leather—A Prototype
of Stitch-less Jacket Grown in a
Technoscientific “Body,” 2004.
Biodegradable polymer connec-
tive and bone cells. The Tissue
Culture & Art Project, hosted
at SymbioticA—the Centre of
Excellence in Biological Arts,
School of Anatomy and Human
Biology, University of Western
Australia
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disease prevention and cure still apply. Scale, too, is absolutely critical to the theory
and practice of biodesign, yet it is little mentioned by its promoters.
Finally, is it really likely that selfish shortsightedness will inadvertently lead to an
ecological and social utopia? Bioartists seem more willing than biodesigners to discuss
the ethics of domination and exploitation that inhere to the trend of the “biologicali-
sation of our world.”14 For example, Catts and Zurr contributed the essay “Growing
Semi-Living Structures” to a special 2008 issue of Architectural Design in which they
stressed that their goal as artists is to question and subvert these technologies and
place the complex ethical dilemmas of biodesign before their viewers. Despite these
statements, it appears that none of the architects or designers who uphold their bioart
as a prototype for biodesign has seriously engaged with their critical intent or with the
ethical problems.15
Catts and Zurr challenge the exportation of Western consumerism and biotechnolo-
gies as an ongoing form of imperialism, since these are based in and foster exploitation
of other living beings, including other
species as well as human labor. In their
essay “Are the Semi-Living Semi-Good
or Semi-Evil?” they describe the prevail-
ing ideological context of biotechnology
as imperialistic in light of racist and
sexist practices they see on display in the
“global war on terror,” where a variety of
others are targeted for exclusion. Because
“the form and the application” of bio-
technologies “will be determined by the
prevailing ideologies that develop and
control the technology,” they write, only
if a new ideology of cooperation rather
than domination and control prevails is
there hope for our interactions with the
living and the “semi-living.” They state
that their own artistic “motives are based
in exposing social hypocrisies in regard
to what is natural and also shifting
definitions of the ‘other.’ If we are not
able to be compassionate for differences
in our own species,” as is so evident now
and in past history, “will the existence
of the Semi-Living or a collaborative
symbiotic collection of cells enable us,
even a little bit, to present a mirror of
our absurdities?”16 These questions call
for real change in human perception
and behavior, change in the direction
of respect and cooperation rather than
selfishness and competition, as a neces-
sary prerequisite to biodesign. Without
these, one biodesigner’s utopia will be
intricately intertwined with another
being’s dystopia.
28 Summer 2011
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 Notes
1 Estévez directs the ESARQ Genetic Architectures doctoral program, International University of
Catalonia. See his “Genetic Architectures,” in Genetic Architectures, ed. Estévez et al. (Santa Fe:
Lumen and SITES Books with ESARQ, 2003), 11, 15, 17. He writes of Adolf Loos’s vision of covering
his wife’s room with fur in “Biomorphic Architecture,” in Genetic Architectures II: Digital Tools and
Organic Forms, ed. Estévez et al. (Santa Fe: Lumen and SITES Books with ESARQ, 2005), 72.

2 Econic Design: A New Paradigm for Architecture is available at www.youtube.com/

watch?v=7vtKyFsUtW8 (accessed January 16, 2010). On the video, see Christina Cogdell, “Tearing
Down the Grid,” Design and Culture 3, no. 1 (March 2011): 75–84.

3 Matthias Hollwich and Marc Kushner, “MEtreePOLIS,” Architectural Design 80, no. 6 (November
2010): 59.

4 Ibid.

5 They talked at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference; Hollwich also presented
his ideas of econic design at TEDxAtlanta on January 26, 2010; see http://tedxatlanta.com/
videos/01262010-repurpose/matthias-hollwich/.

6 Nicholas Wade, “Researchers Say They Created a ‘Synthetic Cell,’” New York Times, May 20, 2010.

7 Ted Sargent, “Nanotechnology: Design in the Quantum Vernacular,” in Design and the Elastic Mind
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), 82–83. See also Paul Rothemund, “Folding DNA to
Create Nanoscale Shapes and Patterns,” Nature 440, no. 16 (March 2006): 297–302.

8 See www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_rothemund_casts_a_spell_with_dna.html, March 2007

(accessed January 19, 2011).

9 Estévez, “Biomorphic Architecture,” 78.

10 “Neoplasmatic Design,” ed. Marcos Cruz and Steve Pike, special issue, Architectural Design 78, no. 6
(November–December 2008): passim. Dennis Dollens, Digital-Botanic-Architecture (Santa Fe: SITES
Books with Lumen, 2005), 58–67; Cruz and Pike, “Neoplasmatic Design,” 4, 6, 15 nn. 1 and 2.

11 John Schwartz, “Museum Kills Live Exhibit,” New York Times, May 13, 2008, F3.

12 Paola Antonelli, Design and the Elastic Mind (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2008), caption
at 115, and exhibition wall text. Catts and Zurr created the Tissue Culture & Art Project through
SymbioticA, the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory, School of Anatomy and Human
Biology, University of Western Australia, Perth. The wall text dates the original Victimless Leather
prototype to 2004, but the version on display was created in 2008, since it died five weeks into
the show.

13 On the production of fetal calf serum and ideas about “sustainability” as regards the cattle industry,
see Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, “The Ethics of Experiential Engagement with the Manipulation of
Life,” in Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, ed. Beatriz Da Costa and Kavita Philip
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 132–33 and 141 n. 19.

14 See Catts and Zurr, “The Ethics of Experiential Engagement with the Manipulation of Life,” 125–42;
Catts and Zurr, “Growing Semi-Living Sculptures: The Tissue Culture & Art Project,” Leonardo 35,
no. 4 (2002): 365–70; and Antonelli, Design and the Elastic Mind, 115.

15 Catts and Zurr, “Growing Semi-Living Structures: Concepts and Practices for the Use of Tissue
Technologies for Non-Medical Purposes,” Architectural Design 78, no. 6 (November–December
2008): 30–35.

16 Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, “Are the Semi-Living Semi-Good or Semi-Evil?” Technoetic Arts: A
Journal of Speculative Research 1, no. 1 (2003): 49, 51, 54, 59.

29 American Art

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