<div>Dennis Dollens is a research designer and writer living in Santa Fe, NM. He has taught in the Genetic Architecture Program at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya in Barcelona. His most recent book is "DBA: Digital-Botanic Architecture."</div>

The Architecture of Enric Miralles & Carme Pinos

Arts & Photography

BUCHANAN, Peter

Dollens, Dennis

Architecture

Lumen Books

Digital-Botanic Architecture (D-B-A) explores physical as well as digital design and architecture based on biological forms—especially plant morphology. Fusing Leibniz’s eighteenth-century metaphysic with Richard Dawkins’ twentieth-century theory of the meme, D-B-A simultaneously interweaves Louis Sullivan’s “botanic architecture,” as developed in his A System of Architectural Ornament, with current design, contending that architecture is a waylaid biological extension of its builders—an extended phenotype, as Dawkins would call it.
Dollens also explores the use of software such as Xfrog in order to grow building elements using the software’s botanic algorithms. In his own work he designs hypothetical structures and building-skins that are realized in digital models, physical stereolithographic models, graphics, and animations: for example, his 2004 spiral bridge (influenced by a seedpod’s spiraling flight and by the biological lattice of the sponge, Euplectella).
D-B-A also considers the work and theory of Duncan Brown’s experimental game spaces and digital architecture. And to this discussion Dollens adds consideration of stem cell sculptures as they relate to the potential for growing buildings and their impact on the larger idea of growing architecture.
D-B-A thus carries Dollens’ investigations well beyond his previous studies—Exodesic, The TumbleTruss Project, D2A: Digital to Analog, and Genetic Architectures / Arquitecturas Genéticas (with Ignasi Pérez Arnal and Alberto Estévez)—to illustrate the hybridizing of philosophical, theoretical, and computational thought and practice in digital design and architecture.

Digital-Botanic Architecture: D-B-A

“Dollens has written beautifully about one of the most passionate, committed, and innovative advocates for traditional earthen construction in our time.”—Ed Crocker. Crocker Ltd., Architectural Conservation“Swan’s life and work perfectly capture the spirit and romance of the American West. Only at the risk of its own irrelevance will the architecture profession ignore the lessons in Dollens’ book on Swan’s practical yet elegant and modern adobe solutions to housing.”—William Menking, editor of The Architect’s NewspaperLike an organism sitting and breathing on its site in the Chihuahuan desert, the Swan House is a building of organic beauty and hybrid cultural intelligence. Simone Swan has created an architectural and environmental project that re-examines and promotes traditional adobe building while introducing compatible forms, such as the Nubian vault and dome.Swan studied with the great Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy in his Cairo studio and after his death in 1989 adopted his mission of helping house the world’s poor.Simone Swan: Adobe Building is the first book to discuss and illustrate Swan’s architecture while also chronicling one of her annual workshops in Dollens’ first-hand account. Dollens suggests that by biologically analyzing historic adobe we may be able to hybridize its constituents as replacements for current toxic materials, creating new biomimetic, adobe-related building materials suitable for green architecture.Dennis Dollens is the author of D2A: Digital to Analog; DBA: Digital-Botanic Architecture; Exodesic: Structures, Tumbleweeds, Electronics; and El Proyecto TumbleTruss / The TumbleTruss Project.

Simone Swan: Adobe Building

Science & Math

Nature & Ecology

Sites

Learning from graphic novels and anime, this manga-inspired comic book tours new ideas about the environment, design, digital and natural growth, and architecture in the work and writing of Dennis Dollens. The pangolin functions as a tour guide and mascot, frequently interjecting comments that make the brief format dense with illustrated ideas and modes of designing, yet comprehensible as an introduction to the experimental ideas. The comic illustrates how biomimetics—the search for form and systems in nature—can be used to integrate natural processes with experimental design and digital production to conceive, visualize, generate, and model architectural and design elements extrapolated from nature, and how that process has evolved in Dollens’ Santa Fe and Barcelona-based design and writing.
Looking to seeds, plants, trees, shells, etc., for new architectural forms via software, animation, digital modeling, and CAD-CAM (computer aided design/computer aided manufacturing) production, the comic book presents ideas for new, sustainable, nontoxic materials while also considering how sustainable environments can be integral with technical innovation and contemporary form. The comic suggests how biological materials are on the horizon and how they might be conceived of as contributing to the environment in a potentially “intelligent” manner.
Since the late 1990s Dollens has experimented with and manipulated software for growing plants and trees, not only in order to grow interlocked, branching structures (trusses), but also to investigate the possibilities of leaf and pod-like volumes revisualized and redesigned as units and clusters for prototypes of floors and walls, rooms and skyscrapers. The resulting digital models and graphic renderings stem from radical software (Xfrog-Rhino-Studio MAX) hybridization. Yet, the resulting sphere or cube clusters retain plantlike aspects of phyllotaxic distribution, phototropic or gravitropic orientation, and/or Fibonacci-like proportions, giving the models a digital-biological heritage.
Specifically, the comic illustrates how “digitally grown” experimental works nurtured in the plant-generating software (Xfrog) can be built as rapid prototype models, further suggesting how nature and computation can produce a collaborative approach to architecture, design, and fabrication.

The Pangolin's Guide to Biomimetics & Digital Architecture: Architecture & Biomimetics Series #1

Computers & Technology

Metabolic Architectures: Turing, Sullivan, Autopoiesis & AI

Independently published

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Books by Dollens, Dennis