REIA #29 - Call For Papers

“Biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature.” Janine Benyus
“The city must be recognized as part of nature and designed accordingly.” Anne Whiston Spirn

Editorial Introduction

Architecture is entering a biological turn. Across research, practice, and culture, designers are increasingly looking to living systems not only as sources of formal inspiration, but as models of organisation, material production, adaptation, and care. Biology is becoming a field of architectural knowledge: a way to understand structure, growth, responsiveness, and interdependence.

The REIA 29 Call for Papers, Bioarchitecture: Designing the Inhabited Ecosystem, invites architects, researchers, designers, scientists, artists, and theorists to examine this transformation. What happens when architecture is no longer conceived only as the production of buildings, but as the design of relationships within living systems? By bringing together voices across disciplines, REIA seeks to explore bioarchitecture as a field where biology, technology, and spatial practice redefine the conditions of inhabitation.

Theme Overview

Learning from the Living. Biomimetics, morphogenesis, biological intelligence. From shells, bones, leaves, webs, nests, skins, and microbial colonies, architecture has long drawn analogies between natural form and constructed form. Today, however, biomimetics is no longer limited to resemblance. Computational design, material science, and environmental simulation allow architects to study biological intelligence as process: optimisation without central control, resilience through redundancy, structural efficiency through differentiation, and adaptation through feedback. Nature is not treated simply as an image to imitate, but as a repository of performative strategies.

Building with the Living. Biomaterials, biofabrication, living materials. Mycelium composites, algae systems, bacterial concretes, bioplastics, bio-based insulation, and other emerging materials are challenging the assumption that building matter is inert. Biofabrication proposes a different material culture, one in which construction can become cultivation and maintenance can become care. These experiments raise technical questions about durability, regulation, scalability, and performance, but also deeper questions about authorship, agency, and responsibility when buildings are made with living or once-living matter and integrate elements of biological cycles.

Designing the Living. Inhabited ecosystems, biodiversity, multispecies coexistence. This third line moves from biological inspiration and biological matter toward architecture as an active participant within living systems. Earlier visions of Metabolist architecture imagined buildings and cities as adaptable frameworks capable of growth and transformation. Contemporary biotechnology, circular design, responsive systems, and ecological thinking renew these ambitions: growth, metabolism, repair, ageing, and decay become architectural parameters rather than failures to be hidden or postponed.

In this paradigm, buildings are not isolated objects for human occupation alone, but participants in complex ecological networks involving humans, animals, plants, fungi, microorganisms, soils, water, energy, and atmosphere. Architecture becomes a medium for coexistence, biodiversity, and regeneration. The question is no longer only how to reduce environmental impact, but how to design conditions in which multiple forms of life can flourish.

Across these three lines, bioarchitecture appears as both technology and ethics, experiment and responsibility, speculation and practice. This REIA Call for Papers invites contributions that critically and creatively examine how architecture changes when it learns from the living, builds with the living, and designs within the living systems that sustain the wider metabolism of the planet.

We invite:

• Academic papers (10.000-30.000 characters)
• Design research, visual essays, or speculative proposals
• Literature reviews

Submissions may draw from architecture, urban design, planning, landscape architecture, biology, material science, environmental humanities, philosophy, digital design, cultural studies, or allied disciplines.