Mitchell Joachim is excited. The rabble-rousing architectural, ecological
and urban design magus is on the cusp of shedding his non-profit skin – and
he’s intent on making an impression.

If Joachim stays true, the modus operandi of New York-based Terreform
ONE – his New York-based non-profit “do-tank” collective that promotes
green city design through polemical statements, exhibitions, teaching,
prototyping, cellular tampering, and conceptual wizardry – that won’t be
much of a stretch.

“Love slaves are really useful,” he says with confident Big Apple brio,
adding that the new venture will be an addendum to his other duties, which
include Terreform ONE and a post as an associate professor at New York
University.

“But sometimes you need somebody that is earning a serious paycheck
that can devote 40+ hours a week to getting an operation done.

“If you’re wearing the cape like we’re doing now and trying to do the
superhero thing, you have to recognise we can try the same process in a
profit-driven model and it might get us better results.”

Terreform ONE’s vision is certainly striking: a synaptic shock of
future vistas and hardcore ecological aspiration, all shot through with a
surprisingly sense of practicality.

“It is all based on off-the-shelf, available materials, ideas, concepts
and technologies,” Joachim explains.

With a design portfolio that reads like the set and prop manual for the
greatest Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster never made, this is a remarkable, and
incredibly exciting, claim.

Prominent ideas include the Fab Tree Hab, which uses prefabricated
computer numeric controlled reusable scaffolds to graft trees into homes,
and the in vitro Meat Habitat, a house made out of 3D printed extruded pig
cells (mixed with collagen powder, xanthan gum, mannitol, cochineal, sodium
pyrophosphate, and recycled PET plastic scaffold) to form “real organic
dwellings”.

Mitchell and co have been conducting laboratory tests for the latter
via BioWorks, a joint venture with a molecular cell biologist. “Something
that was pure science fiction 50 years ago is boutique biology today,” he
says proudly.

On a larger scale, Joachim pre-empted Disney’s Wall-E with the notion
of automated robot 3D printers that can modify and process trash to extend
New York City using its own landfill, whereas Urbaneering Brooklyn is
currently wowing punters at the Center of Contemporary Art in Prague with a
staggeringly realised plan to bend the titular New York borough to a
radical ecological blueprint.

In a Terreform ONE city you can also expect to encounter some seriously
nifty kit – from soft, stackable death-proof cars to blimp buses that scoop
passengers up ski-lift style. Oh, and jet packs.

“Jet packs have been invented, it is actually a pretty robust system,”
says Joachim excitedly.

“If I was a kid growing up today I would not want to work for America’s
train companies – horrible grandfather business models – I’d much rather
get into the new jetpack company.

“It’s about the safety mechanisms that go into them. Are they greener?
And what are the benefits and constraints of moving around? And who thinks
about this stuff? We do, and we have done. And we don’t just think about
them, we design them and draw them and model them.”

Also to be filed under the ‘oh my god’ file are the Future North
Ecotarium, floating urban platforms engineered to migrate millions towards
colder climes in apocalyptic climate change scenarios, and Homeway, wheeled
dwellings that enable residents to flock towards downtown city cores and
back, transforming static suburbs into a “dynamic and deployable flow”.

Don’t call any of this stuff sustainable though. “Sustainability in
America is just a philosophy,” Joachim sighs. “It’s like the words eco-
friendly. Eco-friendly and sustainability do not mean anything on a legal
or scientific level.

“You ask ten scientists what sustainability is and you’ll get ten
different answers. I find that truly ineffective. It is such a wishy-washy
term – anyone can put a stamp on their projects and say they are doing
something sustainable.

“Sustainable is an absolutely weak term,” he continues, warming to his
tirade.

“It represents the status quo, you certainly don’t want your favourite
sports team to be sustainable. You want them to win, evolve, grow, nurture,
change, to make a radical contribution to environment or the world, not
just keep it going.”

Joachim and Terreform ONE are all about “socio-ecological development”,
putting the “funk in functionalism”.

“It’s got to be something people are excited about, something people
think is fabulous, something that is visually enticing,” he explains.

There’s certainly no denying Joachim captures the imagination. Rolling
Stone magazine named him as one of the 100 People Who Are Changing America,
Wired magazine included him in its Smart List as one of the 15 People the
Next President Should Listen To, and he was recently interviewed on
political satire’s show of the moment (alongside the The Daily Show), The
Colbert Report.

Joachim is under no illusions that many of his proffered visions will
transpire in his lifetime, but refuses to be cowed by critics , of which
there are many in the blogosphere, that tag his work as pointlessly
conceived fantasy.

“I know what we contribute, I’ve got nothing to prove to [the
critics],” he says.

“If you were to look back at major figures like Jules Verne, they have
contributed enormously to science and society. He imagined man going to the
moon, to do something that was completely unfeasible, totally impossible in
his time. He said there were some technologies out there, some directions
and put together a narrative about going to the moon, which is the exact
narrative that was used when JFK challenged NASA, challenged America to get
to the moon.

“The bottom line is that the beauty of Jules Verne was in the hearts
and minds and imagination. It was central to the success in that mission.”

He pauses. “We aren’t promisary. We just leap into the narrative, into
the description and produce a culture if one of those objects or
technologies were to exist. Those contributions are extremely important.
They are vital for the success of a society.”

When Joachim launches the as yet unnamed for-profit arm (with six other
partners, including Terreform ONE co-founder Maria Aiolova), the initial
output will be less grand in scale than the designs that have made him
famous, though it will certainly not lack imagination or be environmentally
compromised.

Among the putative early money-spinners are a software design package
(because Joachim couldn’t find software that did what he wanted), and the
Willow Ball, mini tree lodges composed of prefabricated pleached structures
that can be used as individual pods like tents or clustered together to
create an interlinked habitat.

As for bigger build, Joachim would love to get his hands on a meaty
project like an aquarium, and has submitted some proposals for building one
in Brooklyn (“We would do the best god-damn aquarium they’ve ever seen.”)

He is in no rush though, citing Daniel Liebskind’s career arc as one
worthy of emulation – years of research, experience and training before his
first building, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, was built when he was into his
fifties.

“The reality is most architects make brick lumps,” says Joachim
pointedly.

“And they make brick lumps by having conversations on the phone all day
long with bricklayers, plumbers, electricians and go to site and check on
these things, and they produce vacuous, uninteresting works as opposed to
real, original contributions to the field of architecture.

“We’re going to hold off until we get all the right pieces in play.”

Joachim was born in New Jersey “somewhere between Bon Jovi and Bruce
Springsteen” but spent most of his formative years in New York.

After being discouraged by his father to become a painter, he chased
architecture with rare intensity, landing his first job at the age of 14 as
a draughtsman for Carl Hesse before going on to rack up an impressive
scholastic CV at MIT, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Buffalo.

His desire to create projects with benign or even positive
environmental impacts was borne of rebellion, kicking against the
deconstructionist philosophies cluttering his education in the mid-
Nineties.

“It was completely abstract, very dark, incredibly maudlin and dour,
and we would produce projects that were fragmented and distorted with
language that was fragmented and distorted to critics that were using
fragmented and distorted language back at us because nobody really
understood what we were doing.Everyone wore a lot of black and we were
pretty creepy.”

Taking cues from Austrian architect Christopher Alexander and the
philosophies of great American thinkers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Joachim came to the conclusion that for all the rampant theorising
and intellectual preening, very little effort was being made to solve
actual problems.

“It wasn’t architecture that was helping society, it was architects
with their heads deep up their own asses, thinking about philosophy and
high notions,” he recalls.

“I started to realise. The problem is climate change, the problem is
the environment.”

Joachim’s talent quickly secured work with Gehry Partners, and Pei Cobb
Freed, and an impressive architectural career beckoned, but satisfaction
was in short supply and, after a while, the corporate atmosphere inevitably
became intellectually stifling.

Terreform ONE was formed as an escape, a pure outlet where the thoughts
of like-minded architects and innovators from the arts and sciences could
bounce off each without inhibition and ask the crucial question, ‘why
not?’, over and over. It is not, nor has it ever been, about getting rich.

“Look, I’m different to Donald Trump,” he says wrly. “I don’t really
know what drives that guy but I think it is money, and maybe hairpieces and
ego. But I get my jollies from making some drawings and doing some serious
engineering and design work. We do things for the environment, for
communities, and selfishly we do it for ourselves as it excites us.”

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