Rachel Armstrong in Wired UK!
TED Fellows: Rachel Armstrong
|08 October 2009 |Categories: TEDGlobal 2009 
The TED Fellows are among the world’s experts at spreading great ideas. Each year the organisation picks 50 people doing groundbreaking work in a vast range of disciplines. The fellows at this year’s TEDGlobal event in Oxford included a political scientist, a pastor, an Ethiopian singer, a high-tech magician and an astronomer. Each fellow presents his or her work in a two-day pre-conference event, staying on for the main conference to meet and debate with the entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, doctors, researchers and film-makers that make up the TED audience.Here is the first of six TED Fellow profiles to appear on Wired.co.uk. Six more will appear in Wired magazine over the next few issues. The first provides more details of Rachel Armstrong's work.
Dr Rachel Armstrong believes that biology could play a key part in building projects.
Armstrong teaches at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where she is advocating a new approach to architecture – one that sees buildings becoming living things. Key to Armstrong’s work are protocells – little cells of fat that can be sprayed on a building, creating a sort of frosting. These are designed to trap carbon dioxide and solidify it, turning it into solid pearls of calcium carbonate or biolime or mock rock. This coating will protect the building and even mend cracks.These protocells could even be used to stop Venice sinking, says Armstrong. Her plan is that the cells would be programmed to solidify when they get to the bottom of the lagoon, shoring up the foundations of the buildings above and thereby supporting the sinking structures.
Working with Neil Spiller, a fellow professor at the Bartlett, Armstrong has named this new model and methodology "plectic systems architecture".
The idea doesn’t stop with protocells. Armstrong argues that slime mould – something we scrupulously scrub off surfaces – could be used instead of computers to map out cities and populations. Mould could power what she terms “material computers”, which could be used to “calculate” for example, the best pathways to construct in an environment.
“Owing to their effective internal organisation, slime mould can solve simple mazes to find the shortest path to food. Slime mould organisms could physically ‘solve’ population mapping in urban landscapes by calculating a number of pathways and respond with a physical map based on biological decisions.” Armstrong argues that slime mould could also be grown to take impurities out of the air, harmful materials from drains and even just make the outside of buildings look more interesting.
