It is hard to miss the power that the biological - or 'biotechnical imagination' - has in contemporary culture, and architecture has certainly not overlooked it. This has become particularly evident in the blurry bleed between digital and biological paradigms, with metaphorical associations, formal or processual mimicry, and other slippages between the two having a long history. Budding out of this historical relationship, we are now seeing the emergence of'biotechnical architecture', where architects are exploring biotechnologies to engage directly with biological or living materials. Currently in a similarly nascent position to that of digital architecture in the early 1990s, this area of design exploration, as Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr point out in this issue (see pp 70-75), is still to be scrutinised.
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