The Era of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Generation of Building Materials
Interview with Giorgia Cannici – Virginia Tech
Giorgia Cannici of Virginia Tech works at a point where biology in not just a source of inspiration for biomimicry, but starts becoming the fabrication process in its own right.
Her investigative research spans synthetic biology, recombinant protein engineering, biomineralization, and field driven design in living systems, with an eye to architectural applications in the distant future.
At CDFAM in Washington DC, she will present her work on engineered magnetotropic plants, exploring whether directional growth might be guided not only by gravity and light but by engineered magnetic responsiveness.
The conversation that follows moves from microgravity and space environments to verification, qualification, and what it means to design with systems that remain alive after they are built.
You are working across biology, engineering, and architecture in ways that do not map neatly onto any single discipline. Can you describe what your research group is investigating, why this direction, and what you will be presenting at CDFAM?
Broadly, we are interested in how biological systems can be engineered or guided to become material and fabrication processes for the built environment.
This includes work in synthetic biology, recombinant protein engineering, biomineralization, and field-responsive living systems. Rather than treating biology simply as a source of inspiration, we investigate how living organisms and biologically produced materials can be programmed to grow, self-assemble, mineralize, and respond to environmental stimuli in controllable ways.
A major motivation behind this work is the idea that architecture and manufacturing may eventually move away from purely extractive, energy-intensive production methods toward processes that are grown, adaptive, and biologically integrated. In that sense, we are interested not only in making new materials, but in redefining fabrication itself as a process of guiding growth rather than simply assembling matter.
At CDFAM, I will present work on engineered magnetotropic plants: the idea that plant growth, especially directional growth, might be guided not only by gravity or light, but by engineered magnetic responsiveness.
This began as a question about space and microgravity, where gravity is no longer a reliable organizing vector. But the broader question is architectural: can growth itself become a steerable design process?
The idea of replacing gravity with a magnetic field as the control input for plant growth is not an obvious engineering move. Where did that line of thinking come from?
The idea came from earlier research during my PhD, where I worked on magnetic amyloid nanofibers and the control of anisotropic behavior in biologically derived bioceramics.
In that work, we explored whether magnetic fields could be used to influence the organization and orientation of protein-based assemblies during material formation. That research raised a broader question for me: if magnetic fields can guide the organization of matter at the material scale, could similar principles eventually be applied to living systems?
Later, through conversations and brainstorming with my colleague Bastiaan Bargmann from Plant and Environmental Sciences, we began discussing whether plants might also be guided through engineered magnetic responsiveness.
Plants already rely on environmental fields and gradients — gravity, light, moisture, and hormonal or chemical signaling — to orient growth. So the question became: could magnetic fields become another controllable input?
This was especially compelling in the context of microgravity and space environments, where gravity is no longer a stable organizing vector. From an engineering perspective, magnetic fields are interesting because they provide a long-range, non-contact way of guiding biological behavior. They offer a way to potentially guide biological behavior without physically constraining the organism.
It is not about “replacing” gravity completely, but about asking whether we can create an artificial directional cue when gravity is unavailable or insufficient.
If biological growth becomes a steerable fabrication process, what does the design workflow actually look like? How does an architect or engineer specify what they want in a volumetric and temporal manner, and what does the system respond to?
If biological growth becomes a fabrication process, then design cannot be only about specifying a final geometry. It has to include time, gradients, environmental conditions, and biological response.
An architect or engineer might specify a desired growth direction, density, curvature, branching behavior, or material distribution over time. The system would respond to inputs such as light, nutrients, humidity, mechanical constraint, magnetic fields, or genetic programming.
So the workflow becomes less like drawing a static object and more like designing a set of instructions, boundary conditions, and feedback loops that guide a living system toward a material outcome.
That said, I think it is important to be realistic about the timeline of these technologies. This is not something that will immediately become a broadly accessible fabrication method. Much of this work is still fundamental research, and I am primarily interested in pushing the boundaries of what might eventually become possible rather than claiming that these systems are ready for widespread deployment today.
More generally, I believe bioengineering has the potential to radically transform how we design and manufacture materials, buildings, and infrastructures. But biology is extraordinarily complex, and translating biological processes into reliable engineering systems will require patience, interdisciplinary collaboration, and many years of research. In many ways, we are still at the beginning of learning how to design with living systems rather than simply extracting from them.
Field-driven design approaches, signed distance functions, and implicit modeling seem like a natural fit for a process that is continuous, spatial, and time-dependent. Tools like Houdini, built originally for animation, have a temporal layer that may be relevant here. What software have you been exploring for designing with and for this kind of process, and what would you like to see the software developers in the CDFAM audience build?
I think this is where computational design becomes very interesting. Tools such as Houdini, implicit modeling, field-driven design, signed distance functions, and simulation environments already think in terms of gradients, volumes, forces, and time.
At the same time, biology is also developing its own computational ecosystem. Tools such as AlphaFold for protein structure prediction, cellular and genetic simulation platforms, agent-based biological modeling systems, and reaction–diffusion simulations are beginning to fundamentally change how we understand and engineer living systems. Synthetic biology increasingly relies on computational prediction, simulation, and optimization in ways that parallel computational design and engineering.
What I find exciting is the possibility that these worlds may eventually converge. Architectural and fabrication software traditionally focuses on geometry and mechanics, while biological software focuses on development, emergence, self-assembly, and molecular behavior. But living fabrication processes require both.
Most architectural software is still optimized for static geometry. What I would love to see are tools that allow designers to work with growth fields, temporal morphologies, and biological constraints — not just shape, but developmental behavior.
For example, a designer could define a volumetric target, assign field conditions, simulate biological response over time, and compare possible growth trajectories. The software should help us design not only the object, but the conditions under which the object emerges.
This work sits somewhere between a biological experiment and a manufacturing process. How do you think about verification and qualification when the fabrication agent is a living organism?
I think it is important to distinguish between different categories of biologically related materials, because they do not all pose the same challenges.
There are materials that are biologically produced — for example timber, cellulose-based materials, mycelium composites, or bio-derived insulating systems. In those cases, biology is primarily involved in the production or growth phase, but the resulting material is ultimately treated much like many conventional natural materials. Verification and qualification for these systems can follow frameworks that are already relatively familiar in architecture and engineering: mechanical testing, durability studies, thermal performance, weathering, fire resistance, and so on.
Then there is another category: truly living or active materials, where the biological component remains metabolically active, adaptive, or responsive over time. That is where things become much more complex.
We are already beginning to see early examples of this direction in systems such as self-healing concrete, including products like Basilisk, where bacteria embedded within the material can become activated in the presence of cracks and moisture and precipitate minerals that help repair the material.
But synthetic biology could potentially push this much further. One could imagine engineered bacterial systems whose activation is tied to highly specific environmental signals. For example, bacteria might be programmed to respond only when corrosion-related compounds or iron oxide associated with rebar rust become present. In that scenario, the biological response would not be continuously active, but conditionally triggered only when structural degradation begins to occur.
That starts to move materials away from passive matter and toward systems capable of sensing, decision-making, and localized response.
When the fabrication agent or the material itself is alive, variability is not necessarily a defect — it is part of the system. But architecture and manufacturing still require reliability and predictability. So verification has to happen at multiple levels: biological behavior, growth trajectory, material properties, repeatability, environmental stability, and long-term response.
We need to measure whether the organism responds as expected, whether the morphology remains within an acceptable range, and whether the resulting material performs adequately under changing conditions.
I suspect qualification for these systems will not look exactly like qualification for conventional manufacturing. It may become more probabilistic, range-based, and adaptive. Instead of asking, “Can we produce the identical object every time?” we may eventually ask, “Can we reliably produce outcomes within a defined performance envelope while maintaining biological function?”
At the same time, once genetically engineered organisms move outside controlled laboratory environments and into buildings, infrastructures, or public space, the conversation is no longer only technical. It also becomes a question of biosafety, regulation, and public acceptance.
Deploying engineered living systems in the built environment would likely require regulatory frameworks closer to those we already see in food systems, biotechnology, agriculture, or biomedical products. The challenge is therefore not only engineering these systems, but also understanding how society will evaluate, regulate, and coexist with living technologies integrated into everyday environments.
In many ways, this requires a broader conceptual shift in how engineering thinks about matter — from static and inert systems toward systems that may continue to evolve, adapt, sense, and respond over time.
But in another sense, matter has never truly been static. Even inorganic materials continuously deteriorate, corrode, fatigue, weather, and transform through interaction with their environment. We are already accustomed to maintenance, replacement, and decay as part of the life cycle of buildings and infrastructures. What is unfamiliar is not really the idea that materials change, but the idea that materials might actively participate in their own repair, adaptation, or response. In that sense, living or bioengineered materials may not represent a complete departure from architecture, but rather a shift from passive matter that only degrades toward systems that can also heal, regenerate, or react to environmental conditions.
The CDFAM audience spans computational design, simulation, and engineering. What do you hope they take away from this work, and what are you hoping to learn from that conversation?
I hope the audience takes away that biology is not only something we imitate or extract materials from. It can become a programmable, responsive, and potentially manufacturable system.
For decades, architecture has often approached biology primarily through biomimicry — learning from natural forms and systems. What interests me is the possibility that we are now developing tools that move beyond imitation toward directly engineering and guiding biological processes themselves. That shift could fundamentally transform how we think about materials, fabrication, and the built environment.
At the same time, I am not presenting this as a finished technology. I am presenting it as a research direction that requires collaboration across biology, design, simulation, manufacturing, and computation. I believe these systems have enormous long-term potential, but they will also require patience. As designers, architects, and engineers, we are often accustomed to immediate visible and tangible results. Biology does not always operate on those timelines. Developing reliable living or bioengineered fabrication systems may take years of iterative research, experimentation, and interdisciplinary collaboration before they become broadly usable technologies.
From the CDFAM audience, I hope to learn how computational designers and software developers would approach these problems. How do we model growth? How do we design with uncertainty? How do we build tools for processes that are spatial, temporal, adaptive, and alive?
The larger question is: if the future of fabrication includes living systems, what kinds of design tools, simulations, and qualification methods will we need?
Many of the technologies we now consider ordinary — from computation to advanced manufacturing and robotic fabrication — once seemed unrealistic, impractical, or external to architecture. In many ways, I see this work as following a similar trajectory. Computational design, software engineering, and robotics were initially perceived as foreign disciplines, yet architects not only adopted them, but expanded and transformed them through design culture and experimentation.
I believe bioengineering may eventually follow a similar path. The biological revolution already underway has the potential to become as transformative for architecture and manufacturing as computation and robotic fabrication have been over the last two decades.
What interests me most is exploring what happens when architecture begins to engage biology not simply as a metaphor or passive material source, but as an active technological framework for fabrication, adaptation, and material intelligence.
Giorgia is careful to frame this as a research direction rather than a technology ready to deploy on the moon today. One that will require patience and sustained collaboration across biology, simulation, manufacturing, and computational design before it becomes in any way usable.
If you are thinking about how to model growth, design with uncertainty, or build tools for processes that are spatial, temporal, and adaptive, CD/DC in Washington DC on July 15-16, is where those conversations happen.
