Philip Beesley: Reflections on Open Space — Metastable, Precarious, Resilient
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Top view of Aria, immersive environment installed at TU Delft Science Centre, 2024. image / Philip Beesley
Design Tech Public Lecture Series
Abstract
This talk will outline a conceptual approach to current architecture, offering precarious instruments that might help indicate our emerging reality. Tough and resilient optimism can be expressed within new forms of language that are delicate, curious, and open. What is coming in our future? How can we speak of the future when the world is unspeakably insecure?
It is tempting to respond by building closed walls around our homes, and closed shells around each of our individual worlds. Yet new science tells me that life is always open, not closed. It tells us that life is continually arising and continually being created. My work is based on this new science.
The hovering, oscillating membranes that are gathering within this work speak of worlds arising in fertility. They invite us to be open, instead of closed. With these architectures, the boundaries of our own homes and cities and even our own bodies might resemble crystalline snowflakes and petaled flowers. We can be unapologetically fragile.
Biography
Philip Beesley is widely known for his immersive sentient physical environments. His current research focuses on the architectural implications of dissipative adaptation and biogenesis at the boundary between mineral and organic realms, revealing fertile qualities. His installations were presented twice at the Venice Biennale for Architecture and are now touring Europe and Oceania. His collaborations with haute couture designer Iris van Herpen appear within 15 collections.
Integrative probes offer paradigms, tools, and frameworks for the emerging discipline of living architecture. Beesley has created an interdisciplinary organization in the Living Architecture Systems Group, connecting sixty organizations and 150 member researchers. He has contributed innovative curriculum frameworks across education and practice. A multi-year collaboration with TU Delft reaches across multiple departments and research groups. Awards that distinguished his collaborative work include two Governor General's awards for Architecture, the Canadian Prix de Rome, VIDA, and FEIDAD. The University of Waterloo awarded Beesley the singular title of University Professor in 2023.
