Marcos Cruz – Winter Lecture Series 2016

Tonight our guest lecturer Marcos Cruz, invited as part of the Winter Lecture Series 2016, inspired the audience with his lecture: Bioreceptive Morphologies.

Climate change, increasing levels of pollution, and the loss of pervious surfaces within the urban fabric has resulted in an ongoing effort of making our cities greener and more sustainable. Roofs and façades have been targeted as an opportunity for greening. However, current green walls have proven expensive to implement and manage. Bioreceptive morphologies and materials could overcome many of the limitations of existing green walls, particularly the need for mechanical irrigation systems and expensive maintenance.

Marcos Cruz is an architect and Professor of Innovative Environments at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is the Director of the BiotA Lab and also co-founder of Syn.de.Bio where he has investigated design that is driven by advances not only in computation, but also in bio-technology and synthetic biology, fields that he believes are radically changing the future of architecture. Cruz research has focused for many years on the design and creation of innovative environments. He has developed a people-centric approach by reconsidering the contemporary body and its broader social, aesthetic and technological dimension in architecture. He has also taught and worked on many projects that utilize living matter in buildings, most of all the utilizations of bacteria and algae.

Marcos Cruz was the Director of the Bartlett between January 2010 and January 2014, having been responsible for a major transformation of the school in terms of its current internationalizations and uncontested reputation as the number one school in the UK. His varied teaching activity as an investigator, tutor and critic has been carried out in numerous international universities, including the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (current), University of Westminster and University California Los Angeles (UCLA), but most of all at University College London where he runs MArch Unit 20 for over 14 years.

Cruz has published and exhibited widely and is co-founder of the architectural practice marcosandmarjan in London. He is currently PI of an EPSRC Design the Future research grant in the UK.

In case you couldn’t join us, the video is now available online on IaaC YouTube Channel:

IaaC Lectures are free and open to the public.
Please find more information on IaaC website.