(un)plug, design for an office tower in Paris

Green thinking is changing the way we build. We’re reusing existing structures and materials, designing more efficient building systems, and thinking about long-term sustainability. But these changes are minor in view of the far deeper changes to come, as ecologically-minded designers reexamine their most fundamental assumptions about a door and a roof and a foundation, and reimagine what a building is entirely.
     The visionary French architecture office R&Sie(n) is right at the forefront. Its projects, collected in the book Bioreboot: The Architecture of R&Sie(n), offer an architecture that’s deeply enmeshed with natural forces, and entirely liberated from modern conventions about design and construction.
     Since the mid-nineteenth century, when steel framing supplanted heavy masonry construction, buildings have been conceived as stable shells that shaped efficient interior environments, as machines for living. R&Sie(n) complicates this paradigm. Its buildings aren’t discrete, unchanging objects but mutable devices embedded within ecologies of weather, time, geology, flora, and fauna.