Terrestrial Architecture

Praise for Terrestrial Architecture

Terrestrial Architecture is about architecture that does not exist yet. It is in the realm of visionary architecture. Like a renaissance man, Jack Oliva-Rendler sets out to create an interdisciplinary unifying holistic theory, a possible future, or opportunity for designing the planet. The book presents a new paradigm where infrastructure, formal geometries as dynamic formulations of space, data, and ecosystems are intertwined to design the planet in a harmonic way. It seeks to address the planet’s natural and climatic urgency through connections of urban form, architecture, and landscape architecture. The reader is led through an exploratory amalgam of subjects from ecology, computation, data, cybernetics, mapping, mechanisms, instruments, and geometry to generate a new future. How will this new architecture take form? How will it go beyond metaphors? How can this holistic type of architecture emerge? What type of political system could enable this type of all-encompassing architecture? It is still yet to come.

Benjamin Pollak, Architectural Designer

In Terrestrial Architecture, Jack Oliva-Rendler elegantly weaves the intricate tapestry of our planet’s architectural narrative, highlighting the symbiosis between humanity’s built environments and the Earth’s organic complexity. This book not only reflects a profound understanding of astrobiology and the paradigm shifts needed to achieve sustainability, but also offers a philosophically rich exploration of our role in shaping and being shaped by the terrestrial landscapes we inhabit. It’s a compelling read that challenges us to rethink our relationship with our planet through the lens of architecture in all its dimensions and fractals. Rendler elegantly illustrates how: As Above, So Below.

Martin E. Wainstein, Founder, Open Earth Foundation

Terrestrial Architecture is a brilliant journey through speculative infrastructures that harmonize ecological and human systems in visually striking and always unexpected ways. This book opens whole new terrains of algorithmic design for sustainability grounded in complex geospatial and metabolic contexts.

Dr. Stuart Cowan, Co-Author Ecological Design and Executive Director, Buckminster Fuller Institute

With beautiful prose and images, Jack Oliva-Rendler restores a spiritual dimension to architecture that has long been absent from most intellectual fields. After reading this book, you will feel more connected to the earth, and to the human projects that both enhance and endanger it.

Graham Harman, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture

Terrestrial Architecture

by

Jack Oliva-Rendler

Copyright © 2024 Jack Oliva-Rendler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

e7 Architecture Studio Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

Jack Oliva-Rendler

https://www.jackrendlercerebrum.com/

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: (hardback) 979-8-9899403-0-1

ISBN: (paperback) 979-8-9899403-1-8

ISBN: (ebook) 979-8-9899403-2-5

Book Design: Rick Schank of Purple Couch Creative

Editing: Jill L. Ferguson

Dedicated to The Creator of the Universe,

My Heavenly Lord and Savior Jesus Christ

.

Table of Contents

PART 1

Comprehension of the Natural Systems or Reality

Chapter 1

Reflections of Ecology, Design, and the Sacred Interconnectivity of All

Chapter 2

GAIA and The Biosphere

Chapter 3

Geochemistry

Chapter 4

Philosophy Biology and Morphology of Nature

Chapter 5

Fractals In Architecture

PART 2

Computation Relative to Terrestrial Architecture

Chapter 6

Cybernetics

Chapter 7

Cyberinfrastructure and NASA’s Earth Observing System

Chapter 8

Platform Architectures and Virtual Community Action Planning

Chapter 9

Global Terrestrial Reality Case Studies: The Resource Extraction, Distribution, and Consumption Dynamic At the Planetary Scale—The Colorado River Basin

Chapter 10

A.T.L.A.S.: Apparatus for Technical Logic in Analytic Structure

Chapter 11

Instrument of Terrestrial Transformation

Chapter 12

Deep Storage and the Operative Architecture: Memories as Tools for Interpolative Envisioning

Part 3

Morphology:

Potentials of Prototypical Abstract Geometry

Chapter 13

Geometric Grids, Systems + Organic Morphologies and Crystallography, Analog and Digital Drawing and Modeling Techniques Following the Rise of Digital Architecture

Chapter 14

Morphogenesis, Epigenesis, and the Continual Meta Morphologies of Architectural Genealogies

Prologue

Living with two parents who are architects I was continuously exposed to radical concepts about architecture. Drawings surrounded me as I grew up in my mother’s classroom, where she taught architecture at Los Angeles Trade Technical College. The conversations in the family at dinner and on a regular basis were engagingly complex with recurring themes like BIM, Tensegrity Models, the built environment, geometry, etc. It was all quite mysterious to me, but I remained curious and related to architecture via the forms of geometry that I could play with.

In high school, I took an AP human geography course that spoke about conflicts in Africa being geographically generated, the landscape, the resources, the political boundaries, and the environments that were the subject of conflict. This resonated with me on a deep level when I expanded what I was learning in my AP human geography class to encompass the world. Our environments affect us. What surrounds us in our lives and the habitats we live in affect us deeply—physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Understanding this led me to study architecture.

In college, I felt like I was decoding the history of my life. I asked myself why my parents were so passionate and why was I so concerned also with the same subject matter? I attended the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) before I went to the Harvard Graduate School of Design where I received my MARCH degree. In college and graduate school I rigorously sought the definition of environmental architecture, chasing the idea of a visionary future with a burning passion. One project stood out among the rest, leading me forward in my journey, the Biomorphic Biosphere by Glen Small, my father’s mentor. Things started to make more and more sense as I studied the Biomorphic Biosphere and deconstructed it from many perspectives. It seemed to reveal answers as to how we can arrive at a built environment that is harmonic with the natural system that has been present on Earth for billions of years.

I’ve encountered a profound novelty in the wonders of nature and its morphologies as a deep sophistication. My explorations in digital architecture and hand drawing are in communication with my philosophical and theoretical research as a perceptual comprehension of environmental architectures. In this book, then, is a robust collection of images associated with in-depth comprehension of terrestrial natural systems, digital technologies that assist such comprehension, and design techniques that allow us to engage the biospheric reality. I’ve also decided to include thoughts regarding humanity’s relationship with the biosphere as a conscious awareness in a philosophical reflection. The awareness I speak of enables certain technical acts of architecture.

I think the book can be inspiring and useful for both the general public and rigorous academics studying or interested in architecture, urbanism, environmental science, engineering, planning biology, philosophy, mathematics, computer science, art, programming, politics, and likely more. I believe it will be a significant contribution to orient ourselves around a planetary existence of humanity linked by the Internet of Things in the Anthropocene having a role to play our environments at the terrestrial scale. Much of architectural discourses as they exist in institutions are concerned solely with parcels and specific sites, while failing to address a fundamental reality and context of the biosphere and planet as a system with billions of years of evolution to create a hospitable space for biodiversity. The conversations regard buildings or city blocks and are not about environments and the design of environments. Meanwhile, on Earth, cities are increasing occupancy by tens of millions, and we build cities in the short time span of a month. We manipulate resources on the planetary scale in unprecedented proportions, the built-environment being the main contributor to such manipulating of resources.

A fundamental misunderstanding exists of how architecture and cities interact with the natural systems because there is no fundamental philosophy of how natural systems and architecture can co-function. The discipline of design is confused to think parcels and autonomy of buildings are the method of achieving environmental architecture.

A greater totality of the built environment exists beyond a single parcel. Contemporary methods of thinking with computational design tools allow for an extended scope of architecture. Our paradigm requires different scales of thinking that are more inclusive and holistic. Urban Design and Architecture, the design of built-environments, now face the dawn of an AI revolution and algorithmic sophistication ever more evolutionary as computational abilities expand. Our landscapes are now canvases and our cities more manipulable than ever. The tides are turning during the dawn of global deep digitalization. Architecture and interdisciplinary integration with environmental sciences, combined with new computational tools, now enable a new kind of potential project heuristic that is terrestrial in scale and fidelity. Such projects of new scope and intention would resolve the tension between urban and natural environments. The energy dynamics of the Earth have a rate of cyclical creation to maintain an abundance of life. As we become more familiar with terrestrial realities, the grace at which our natural environment flourishes will become our own true affluence and cultivated wellness.

PART 1

Comprehension of the Natural Systems or Reality

Chapter 1

Reflections of Ecology, Design, and the Sacred Interconnectivity of All

Architecture’s responsibility, as a design discipline, concerns the Earth and its inhabitants. Projects manage natural systems and craft a relationship between the natural environment and its people. The exchanges between matter and living organisms in the environment may be understood in at least a few ways: economically, energetically, or morphologically. As Pope Francis shares in his encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home : The deterioration of nature is closely connected to the culture which shapes human existence. Economies of growth address certain flows and tendencies of built-environment creation; our sociological systems address the flows of such creations as well. Culture as a means of exchanging ideas, communicating, and sharing in a proliferation of willpower are embodied by designs in morphological acts of architecture. Our philosophies and values assume forms as buildings and infrastructures that orchestrate the movement of people and resources and frame connections between them.

But one of the issues with contemporary architecture is that its focus does not include a certain awareness as to which Earth inhabitants its designs are affecting, and this results in measurable tragic consequences. As Pope Francis writes, The misuse of creation begins when we no longer recognize any higher instance than ourselves, when we see nothing but ourselves. It is as if large quantities of demographics and biodiversity are neglected by the eye of the collective architectural mind. Damaged environments and impoverished societies within built environments originate in flaws of architectural design and a relationship of design to other social systems. A certain sensibility of the Architect to natural