engineering nature's morphogenetic power is the next design frontier—

and it's also key to many advances in diverse fields from architecture to medicine to robotics to space exploration.

Hi, my name is Dr Gizem Gumuskaya, I am a synthetic biologist and architect. My goal is to rigorously combine design and biology to harness the morphogenetic power of living architectures, and thereby create self-constructing structures by design—from tiny biological robots (in my research today, e.g., my PhD invention Anthrobots) to large-scale, carbon-negative buildings one day (soon!).

After completing my undergraduate studies in Architecture at Istanbul Technical University in 2015, I moved on to grad school at MIT where I completed a dual master's degree in Architecture and Synthetic Biology (2015-18), followed by a PhD in Biology at Tufts University & Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically-Inspired Engineering.

I chose to pursue my formal training both in Architecture and Biology, because I strongly believe that to truly unleash what biology has to offer to architects and designers, a deeper understanding of the morphogenetic powers of nature is absolutely critical.

Nature has the ability to build itself. Its structures have the ability to replicate its building blocks in an exponential pace, and heal in the face of damage. They can do real-time spatial computation and respond with embodied intelligence. Most importantly, they have a negative carbon footprint! None of these awe-inspiring features are found in human-made structures, despite our descipline of architecture being thousands of years old. However, we are now at this unprecedended, exciting point in time where, for the first time in history, as architects, we might be able to import these astonishing features of biology into the human-made structures. To do this, we need to speak the language of morphogenesis and "convince" biological tissues to grow themselves into completely novel forms: ones designed by us. This will give us an unparalleled opportunity to tackle some of humanity's most challenging problems from creating sustainable construction methods to novel medical approaches, and even leaps in space exploration.

Thus, in my research I focus on morphogenetic engineering of biological systems to develop synthetic biological structures that can predictably build themselves into target architectures by design. Most recent example of this is from my PhD work Anthrobots, which are the first human-derived self-constructing biological "robots," as well as from my master's thesis work FACETS: Fabrication of Autonomously-Costructed Engineered Three-Dimensional Structures, both were funded by DARPA, the L2M and Engineered Living Materials (ELM) grants, respectively. These grants were created by the US Department of Defense to develop living computational machines and new architectural construction methods by leveraging biological principles like self-construction, self-replication, healing, and carbon capture. Anthrobots and FACETS embody different approaches and cell-types to the same problem: how to get a seed (i.e., a biological cell in this case) to build itself into a completely novel structure designed by us. 

You can read more about my research below (also accessible via the Research Manifesto section under Quick Links on the home page). As I wrap up my PhD in November 2023, I am planning to continue my research in this vein, and focus on expanding self-constructing synthetic living structures to the archtectural lengthscales. 

 

Research Summary

I have been passionate about the top-down design of bottom-up self-organizing systems, in both social and biological contexts. This website documents my work on self-organization by design, starting with human social systems (via urban-scale projects done in architecture school), and continuing with synthetic biological systems (via projects at the cellular & tissue scales done in grad school). Whether it's the design of human-to-human interactions in urban settings unfolding through the public spaces, or the design of cell-to-cell interactions in biological tissues unfolding through the genetic and physiological spaces, I found the governing design principles to be very similar when it comes to the top-down design of bottom-up self-organizing systems. 

 

Top-down Design of Bottom-up Self-organization in Biological Systems

Construction in nature is a self-organizing process governed by a set of construction rules embodied within the builders themselves (cells, termites, wasps...) that unfold as these builders interact with one another and their environment. Furthermore, these builders can self-replicate, and in the process, they propagate these embodied construction rules to their progeny, facilitating the bottom-up self-construction of the biological architectures we see in and around us through an unmatched sophistication of decentralized control, spatial computation, and material composition. 

Take, for example, the development of an embryo from that initial single "seed" cell. Within its merely ten microns-wide nucleus, this initial building block of the embryo encapsulates a two meters-long DNA strand, where physically encoded are the instructions required to build a dynamic, multicellular living structure with massively complex structural, functional, and material properties.

This seemingly magical self-construction process of nature is in stark contrast to the traditional construction methods humans have been using for millennia to build diverse architectures, from the primitive hut to the New York skyline. Enchanted by this dichotomy between bottom-up vs top-down construction in nature vs culture, I began taking a closer look at how these self-construction processes unfold in nature, and came to the transformative understanding that beneath nature’s magic, there is in fact a tremendous amount of logic. Furthermore, we now may be able to engineer this underlying logical framework, through tools of synthetic morphogenesis, and thereby harness nature as a rational design medium for architecture.

This realization has forever changed my path as an architect and designer. It meant that by using the principles of human-developed top-down design, we now may be able to steer natural biological self-construction processes towards rationally designed ends, and thereby build self-constructing living architectures by design. I believe that a rigorous, knowledge-driven, and meaningful juxtaposition of design and biology is critical for reaching the next frontier with the best of both worlds: top-down goal-orientedness of design, and bottom-up autonomous magic of biology!

This passion has empowered me since 2015 to build up my biology knowledge and wetlab skills from ground up, first through a Master's degree in Synthetic Biology with Prof Ron Weiss, then a PhD in (Synthetic) Developmental Biology with Prof. Michael Levin. The more time I spend exploring and forging this path forward, the more I realize how the top-down control of nature’s bottom-up morphogenetic power in this way is giving rise to a new design frontier, one that brings the best of both worlds: top-down rational design of bottom-up autonomous construction. Now, as an architect and synthetic biologist, my intellectual passion is to further explore and forge this new frontier forward and develop synthetic biological structures that can predictably build themselves into target morphologies by design.