by Geoff Olson

The Office: A Living, Breathing Building sounds more like a Stephen King title than a student paper. Teresa Coady’s thesis, written two decades ago for the UBC school of architecture, predated the greening of urban planning and architectural design by years.

Coady is managing and founding partner of Bunting Coady Architects, a firm which focuses on constructing commercial and institutional buildings that are "biologically active producers of energy, rather than passive conservers." (Bunting Coady’s most significant contract at the moment is for the redesign of the Peace Arch customs and immigration building.)

In a recent paper, Coady notes that "buildings and their associated construction and occupancy footprints, consume one sixth of the world’s water, one quarter of the world’s wood and two-fifths of the world’s energy flow and raw materials

If the entire world suddenly developed overnight to the standard currently enjoyed in North America," she adds, "we would need seven planets Earth."

Coady is convinced architecture is moving away from a mechanistic paradigm "a shift that is occurring in every discipline," she says toward a more interconnected, biological paradigm, in which the energy flows and structural elements of buildings are modeled after patterns and rhythms found in nature. Coady and Bunting court would-be clients they feel are ready to pursue this approach which is often not only cost-effective, but cost-saving.

"Ancient arts describe a flow of energy that is lacking from our mechanistic approach to the engineered design of systems," she notes. "There is a natural biological exchange that we are dependent on to sustain life. We are only now beginning to realize that harmony in design is not only necessary for our survival, but spiritually as well. That is why architecture remains an art above a science."

Proselytizing clients to go green isn’t the way to go, Coady told Common Ground. "I don’t say to a client, try to make your building exhibit biofeedback, or reduce the amount of damage you’re doing to the environment, or try to have a building that takes care of itself you know, heats and cools itself. I don’t say to my client, "oh, try this out of context, this difficult, original thing to do and get on board with the direction that construction and architecture is going."

Instead, she explains to clients how it makes good business sense to follow principles inherent in natural systems. Mother Nature isn’t just smart, she’s shrewd; constructing eye-pleasing structures to maximum efficiency, using materials time-tested over millions of years.

Coady’s first intellectual enthusiasms weren’t for buildings and how they were made they were for planets, stars and galaxies. She thought she’d end up becoming an astronomer, studying cosmology. Instead, her fascination with the expression of numbers in spatial dimensions led her to a college diploma in engineering. A degree in fine arts followed, giving her a balance between the two cultures. In retrospect, she feels the mix of science and art made her progress towards architecture a natural.

"The end of an age of architecture is always the beginning of an age of philosophy," she says. Coady believes that buildings represent, in public form, the philosophical interests of a given society. Throughout the history of the west, she insists, cultural shifts begin with new questions and new patterns of thought which find expression in mathematical models that formalize these concepts. These mathematical models and abstract spaces then find their way into science, then into music, then the visual arts and finally the plastic arts of architecture.

Nineteenth century art critic John Ruskin spoke of architecture as "frozen music" a reasonable point of view in the Romantic era. A half century later, modernist architect Le Corbusier was designing buildings that he called "machines for living" which summed up modernist philosophy with all its mechanistic, futuristic baggage.

We have yet to wake up completely from Le Corbusier’s delirium of a mechanical Utopia. Like the glass boxes of modernists, many of today’s postmodern commercial and institutional buildings are behind the intellectual curve. Coady believes they celebrate Newtonian mechanics, a system of thought abandoned by philosophers of science a century ago, but one that still finds expression in the arts.

The medieval-era cathedral celebrates something entirely different, she says. "It celebrates, I believe, the discovery of trigonometry. And the different forces that you can predict because people used to use trigonometry to develop the buttresses they were making a sacred place and creating a bridge between the earth and the sky and trying to use their better understanding of the order of the universe by expressing that in a building."

The pyramids celebrate an earlier understanding of geometry, which predates their construction by perhaps another thousand years.

"Architecture is not just about society celebrating power, which is what a lot of people will get from buildings; it’s a celebration of knowledge, to say ‘we know how to do this, look what heights we can reach, look what we can create with the materials we can use’ it’s a celebration of science, or technology and knowledge."

She notes how we use calculus in our design and construction of buildings. "Newton invented calculus for his study of mechanics. If you look at a big building, what is it but a machine? It’s a place where the air is replaced by machine-conditioned air, the natural light is replaced by artificially, mechanically-induced light, the air flow and the temperature is produced by heating and ventilating and mechanical systems."

We look at the building as a machine, she says, because our way of thinking is still so profoundly influenced by Newtonian mechanics, with its understanding of a clockwork universe that ticks along flawlessly according to deterministic principles.

We still believe there’s a purity to that Newtonian world view, says Coady. "That’s why we break our buildings down into parts, that’s why we have mechanical, structural and civil engineers; we break the building down into its components, because we see it as a machine."

Coady’s alternate view, more holistic and biologically based, uses "passive" systems to heat and light buildings and she encourages professionals to work together in a non-hierarchical manner to achieve these ends. If you look at a building as a system and you start getting your designers to work together and not pull apart into specialties, the results are more integrated and in tune with a larger intent. This is all part of what she calls the integrated design process, a system of working that has been adopted by BC Hydro.

Coady see her firm’s efforts as being in line with the historical arc of math to science to visual art to architecture. The new thinking draws in part on a revolution in math and science that began three decades earlier. In the seventies, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot began to investigate fractal geometry, outputting a computer graphic rendering of a bulbous, spidery shape that became known as the Mandelbrot Set. Fractal geometry involves non-linear equations in which the output is fed back into the equation, producing visually arresting and unique results. Fingerprints, snowflakes and clouds are the "output" of fractal-like operations occurring in natural systems.

With its baroque curlicues and fern-like repetitions, the weird shapes of fractal geometry looked both psychedelic and naturalistic. Sure enough, scientists in various fields discovered that the fractal geometry and the then-new "science of chaos" offered a new model for everything from the human circulatory system to the population crashes of insects. By the mid-‘90s, fractal patterns became fixtures of geek-chic visual art, appearing as wallpaper on computer desktops.

Scientists had discovered that the new biological approach to nature yielded important insights and that the most interesting things occur on the boundary of order and chaos. This is the edge on which nature plays.

Besides fractal geometry and the new sciences of chaos, Coady’s other enthusiasm is for "biomimicry," a burgeoning field in which engineers inspired by nature’s novelty seek to mimic materials and processes that underlie organic systems.

When applied to her area of expertise, Coady’s organically-inspired, holistic approach yields not just green solutions for clients, but can actually save costs.

More on the real-world applications of this new kind of thinking in next month’s Common Ground.





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