sean hanna
research and design

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TERRITORIES OF INTERWOVEN GENETIC DESIGN
a living, artificial landscape

Japan Design Foundation Competition Gold Prize winner
date: 1999
(collaboration with Aniko Meszaros)

A vast, vegetable textile covers over what was a city's polluted, unused industrial harbour, interweaving plan with machine, organic with urban life, creating a new territory of natural exploration. This park organism evolves through biotechnology: an automated laboratory is its generator. This collects pre-existing vegetation and recombines strains to create new growth-accelerated, responsive speces that can float, support human weight, repair themselves, flower when touched, and trace the movements of fish with light as they populate their regenerated environment. This landscape continually transforms itself responding to the evolving ecosystem it sustains and the recreational occupation of its surface.

 


Initial inhabitation and response: The living surface responds to a cut by scarring and swelling, thereby creating new terrain.

  

initial network

year 1

year 3

year 5

year 15

 

Hyperphosphorescent strains emit light in response to movement below.


The motion beneath can be followed on the surface.


The spine alternates growth vessels with voids.		  
A pressurised, hollow-core cable and fibre-optic network serves as infrastructure for planting and maintenence. This runs from the automated lab spine (centre) to the shores. Seeds / spores are extracted from the net, manipulated in the lab, and redistributed based on data generated from field sensors. This will become the communication network of future inhabitants.