"The phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution describes how distant species can develop similar structures when confronted with comparable challenges. Dolphins and ichthyosaurs, for example, are separated by millions of years of evolutionary history, yet both evolved nearly identical hydrodynamic bodies. Architecture has its own parallels: A-frame structures emerged independently in both the European Alps and Japan, even without direct cultural exchange, as spontaneous responses to snow, wind, and material scarcity."
"The construction industry today faces major challenges related to labor shortages, rising material costs, supply chain instability, and increasing regulatory and sustainability demands, all in a context of low productivity and slow digitalization. These pressures make it harder to deliver projects on time, on budget, and with the required environmental performance. Yet, their outcomes converge around a shared set of values: circularity, responsibility, regeneration, and material intelligence."
Convergent evolutionary logic shows that similar environmental pressures produce similar architectural forms, such as independent A-frame emergence in the Alps and Japan. By 2025, construction confronts labor shortages, rising material costs, supply-chain instability, regulatory and sustainability demands, low productivity, and slow digitalization. These combined pressures make timely, on-budget, and environmentally performant delivery more difficult. Outcomes across retrofit, adaptive reuse, low-carbon design, territorial resilience, biodiversity initiatives, and Indigenous knowledge converge around circularity, responsibility, regeneration, and material intelligence. Four central fronts of architectural practice are being reshaped by these forces, with radical circularity—waste and material memory—emerging as a key priority.
Read at ArchDaily
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]