Membranes are fundamental to life because they form the boundaries that protect, organize, and regulate every organism. By controlling what enters and leaves, they create the stable conditions needed for complex processes to coexist: an ability that allowed simple chemistry to evolve into living systems. Humans have long extended this principle by shaping their own boundaries with the environment through clothing and architecture. Garments protect and regulate our bodies, while buildings perform the same role on a larger scale, creating safe spaces that influence how we move, interact, and live together.
“Frontiers of Adaptive Design, Synthetic Biology and Growing Skins for Ephemeral Hybrid Structures” explores how a new technological shift driven by biomimetic design, smart materials, digital fabrication, and synthetic biology is redefining architectural membranes as adaptable, dynamic boundaries inspired by those found in living systems. Designers can now work with materials that respond, transform, and even mimic biological behaviour, enabling construction that uses fewer resources, produces less waste, and integrates multiple functions into single components. Biomimicry brings high-performance natural strategies into design, from spider-silk-like composites and self-healing polymers to humidity-responsive façades and artificial muscle membranes. Digital fabrication advances this potential through 3D-printed elements that combine shading, structure, insulation, and ventilation in real time, while synthetic biology pushes further by blurring the line between natural and artificial, introducing biodegradable fibres grown by engineered organisms, synthetic leaves that photosynthesise, protocells that regenerate surfaces, and plants that emit light.
This move toward materials that can grow, repair, reproduce, and decay on demand brings architecture closer to functioning like a living ecosystem – dynamic, responsive, and regenerative – while also calling for new ethical and cultural frameworks to guide how such technologies are developed and used.
Based on: Persiani, S. G. L., Battisti, A. (2019). Frontiers of adaptive design, synthetic biology and growing skins for ephemeral hybrid structures. In: Energy-Efficient Approaches in Industrial Applications, Eds. Eyvaz, M., Gok, A., Yuksel, E. (London: IntechOpen), 55-73. DOI 10.5772/intechopen.80867