Philip Beesley’s Hylozoic Series: Sibyl

2016

2014

Can architecture feel, and know, and respond to their occupants? Might buildings begin, in primitive ways, to come alive? The Hylozoic Series brings together researchers and industry collaborators from Canada, USA, and Europe in an interdisciplinary research cluster attempting to develop a potent new kind of architecture. The group is devoted to developing new technologies and new aesthetics for responsive, adaptive building systems. Building on early steps that have integrated lightweight digitally fabricated structures, interactive mechanisms and sensor networks within new building structures, the group is now developing functions that pursue empathic feelings and that contain self-renewing metabolisms. This book gathers together working papers for this increasingly ambitious collaboration.

Pratt School of Architecture Journal, 2012

Contemporary Perspectives on Architectural Organicism The Limits of Self-Generation, 2023

This project is born out of similar questions and discussions on the topic of organicism emergent from two critical strands regarding the discourse of organic self-generation: one dealing with the problem of stopping in the design processes in history and the other with the organic legacy of style in the nineteenth century as a preeminent form of aesthetic ideology. The epistemologies of self-generation outlined by enlightenment and critical philosophy provided the model for the discursive formations of modern urban planning and architecture. The form of the organism was thought to calibrate modernism's in nite extension. The architectural organicism of today does not take on the language of the biological sciences, as they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but rather the image of complex systems, be they computational/informational, geo/ecological, or even ontological/aesthetic 'networks.' What is retained from the modernity of yesterday is the ideology of endless self-generation. Revisiting such a topic feels relevant now, in a time when the idea of endless generation is rendered more suspect than ever, amid an ever increasing speed and complexity of arti cial intelligence (AI) networks. The essays collected in this book offer a variety of critiques of the modernist idea of endless growth in the elds of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science. They range in scope from theoretical and speculative to analytic and critical and from studies of the history of modernity to re ections of our contemporary world. Far from advocating a return to the romantic forms of nineteenth-century naturphilosophie, this project focuses on probing organicism for new forms of critique and emergent subjectivities in a contemporary, 'post'-pandemic constellation of neonaturalism in design, climate change, complex systems, and information networks. This book will be of interest to a broad range of researchers and professionals in architecture and art history, historians of science, visual artists, and scholars in the humanities more generally.

2016

Association of Architecture Schools in Australasia

This paper analyses the techniques and technologies mobilized under the imprimatur of biological life in architectural production beyond their manifestations as (bio)mimetic processes. The arguments do not take 'life' as a priori to architectural thinking, but as immanent to each enactment of technique or application of technology within the biological paradigm. Using the work of Roger Caillois on pyschasthenia as the collapse of space between an organism and its milieu, the analysis avoids elevating biological life to a transcendent concept. Biological life in architecture instigates the pragmatic concern for whether a philosophical or scientific concept works, or matters, regardless of whether it fits within an ontology or metaphysics. Thus, architectural production using biological life subscribes to a Deleuzo-Guattarian "pedagogy of a concept"-the creation of perceptual and affective habits that are self-jeopardising and highly idiosyncratic to ensure further concept formation.

Archaí, 2020

A long philosophical tradition has claimed the fact that the concepts of physis and techne should remain radically distinct. But an equally important tradition has instead considered the question in less abstract terms. What can encourage us to rethink the question of hylomorphism is the radical rethinking of the terms at stake. How should the relationship between matter and form (two fundamental Aristotelian concepts) be thought? How should the distinction

Art Papers, 2005