Their buildings have porous, tissue-like skins that fluctuate with the environment. In the design for a vacation home in Trinidad, a twisting, translucent, plastic shell traps moisture and disease-carrying insects. In the proposal for an office building in Paris, an exterior mesh stretches and heaves in response to input from fields of temperature sensors and accretions of photovoltaic cells.
     R&Sie(n) overwite the image of the machine with unsettling imagery of viruses, protozoa, parasites, and droids. For an electronics recharging station in Thailand, R&Sie(n) designed an ephemeral, translucent canopy that’s powered by the counter-weighted movements of an albino water buffalo. It’s a device that’s both enlightened and ominous, intelligent and uncontrollable.
     So many of R&Sie(n)’s projects are speculative that it’s hard to tell if they’re feasible technically, and also to understand what they’ll look like. One of the few realized buildings is a house in France covered with a matrix of airborne ferns and exquisite, pod-like glass vessels. The house has a lush, feral exterior and a spartan, luminous interior. If this is any indication, then the new ecologically-shaped architecture is going to be an awesomely beautiful upheaval.