small plans

“Small Plans” addresses questions about nanotechnology and the built environment at three levels. First, what role does nanotechnology play today in architecture? Many nano-engineered materials are already available to architects and builders, and are beginning to transform our buildings, what we can do in them, and what they can do for us. Looking further ahead, new nanotechnologies now in research and development will likely have a huge impact on building within the next twenty to fifty years. Carbon nanotubes, for example, could bring unprecedented strength and flexibility to our buildings, leading to new forms, new functions, and new relationship between people, building and environment. On the far horizon, the full impact of nanotechnology on our lives and our environment into the next century and beyond is almost unimaginable. Theromprotectant skins, invisible walls and self-replicating structures are all well within the realm of possibility; the social, ethical and environmental effects are equally unimaginable and yet real.

Perhaps this is the promise and the peril of nanotechnology—that its consequences are so extreme and yet so near, as billions of dollars pour into new research and development every year and new advances pour out. The real danger in nanotechnology is not rampant self-replicating viruses or nanobots overunning the planet; the real danger is that, as most of us experienced wit cloning, we will awake one day to find that a technological revolution has already occurred, without our knowledge or our consent, and without us even taking time to determine what we think about it, how we feel about it, or to share those thoughts and feelings in the discourse critical to a reasoned advance in technology.

That day is coming sooner than we think. With its dawn will come new challenges and new relationships between people, buildings and environment. Today is the day to reflect and to discuss what those new challenges and relationships could be. Winston Churchill was not thinking about nanotechnology when he said we shape our buildings and our buildings shape us, but its power to transform us and our buildings brings new urgency to the shaping. Nanotechnology gives unprecedented power to the architects and engineers shaping our world, and the result could be buildings that shape us, as well as our relationships with each other and our environment, in ways that Churchill never could have envisioned.

The aim of “Small Plans” is to kick-start your thinking about nanotechnology and its potential impact on the buildings that shape you, not by forecasting the future—this technology is much too unpredictable for that—but by laying out a realm of possibilities for nanotechnology, architecture and the future of the built environment. These possibilities become almost infinite as we try to extrapolate the impact if nanotechnology fifty or one hundred years from now, so these long-range scenarios are tempered by a closer look at the more immediate impact of nanotechnology and the potential impact of technologies now in research and development. At each stage the personal, social, ethical and environmental consequences are explored because these are the real and significant questions that nanotechnology raises. Nanotechnology will transform our built environment; it is essential that we use it to shape one that is healthier, more comfortable and more humane. Without forethought, dialogue and debate we may awake one day to find that we have already been shaped by it.