Nowadays, everywhere and especially in Russia, we can observe a construction boom. A great expansion of cities creates a variety of environmental problems. Due to the increase of population, construction companies are building more and more providing millions of square meters of housing per year for people’s work and leisure. At the same time abandoned buildings are standing useless because of economic, political and historical events. Real-estate developers prefer to focus on a new construction rather than renovation and overhaul. According to statistics, reconstruction of dilapidated and abandoned buildings allows to reduce the required number of newly built square meters by up to 20%.
The approach to architectural design is becoming more transdisciplinary, combining different sciences such as biology, chemistry and genetics. The world is facing an issue of a new method of reconstruction of existing buildings from self-assembled biological materials developed on the basis of the programmed genetic code with the help of which self-building and self-reconstruction will be possible. Thus, due to the permanent processes taking place in such a building, the period of exploitation and adaptability to any changes in the environment are increasing.
For the application of this concept the abandoned business center "Zenit» in Moscow, Russia, has been taken by us. By 1995, it had been finished by 85%. This abandoned building has a height of 22 floors and a total area of 100 thousand square meters. The building is located near the city center and is easily visible from the surrounding areas. Unfinished skyscraper consists of metal, concrete and blue glass and has a lot of unfinished elevator shafts.
In order to give the building a new life, we use a natural phenomenon of symbiosis by placing inside of it two complementary living organisms that merge to form a new bearing engineering construction of the building and a living adaptive façade. These organisms are transgenic structures. Due to combinations of the required genetic characteristics of DNA taken from 8 different plants, we get a completely unique species of the growing living organism. The moss Yagel was taken as the genetic basis with its unique properties of cold resistance and stamina; a number of plants were taken as minor genes, supplementing the body with such properties as flexibility, light sensitivity, porosity and strength.
In the elevator shaft of the existing building, we put a structure consisting of growing stems, in pores of which the whole engineering supply of the building is carried out. The root system filters and recycles the waste; regenerates water and energy, which makes the building autonomous.
The outer shell carries a protective function of the building. It is a flexible porous structure which needs referent points for growth. Outgrowths of the structural core of the building serve as these referent points. The holes are filled with sensitive natural material that regulates light transmission, thermal protection and ventilation of the construction.
Therefore, this proposal is a completely a new forward looking approach for reconstruction of abandoned buildings. A costly and time-consuming process of building is replaced by high-tech, programmable biological structures which reduce a negative ecological footprint of construction.
