Rachel Armstrong

Prof. Rachel Armstrong (UK) is Professor of Experimental Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. She is a Rising Waters II Fellow with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (April-May 2016), TWOTY futurist 2015, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and a 2010 Senior TED Fellow. She is Director and founder of the Experimental Architecture Group (EAG) whose work has been published widely as well as exhibited and performed at the Venice Art and Architecture Biennales, the Tallinn Architecture Biennale, the Trondheim Art Biennale, the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Institute of Advanced Architecture, Catalonia (IAAC), Aarhus Kuntshal, the University of the Underground (Amsterdam), The Gallatin School, New York University, Allenheads Contemporary Arts, and Culture Lab at Newcastle University. Rachel investigates a new approach to building materials called ‘living architecture,’ which suggests it is possible for our buildings to share some of the properties of living systems. Collaboratively working across disciplines, she builds and develops prototypes that couple the computational properties of the natural world with matter at far from equilibrium. She calls the synthesis that occurs between these systems and their inhabitants “living” architecture. She is coordinator for the €3.2m Living Architecture project, which is an ongoing collaboration of experts. Rachel is widely published in both academic and popular press. Current titles include Origamy, (NewCon Press), Soft Living Architecture: An Alternative View of Bio-informed Practice, (Bloomsbury Academic) and Liquid life: On non-linear materiality (Punctum New York).