Cosmic Garden is presented as a model on a 3D clinostat, a Random Positioning Machine that recreates conditions of quasi-zero-gravity for research into growing plants in the cosmos. Seeds have been sewn into the agar surface inside the continually moving transparent, introverted ‘biosphere’.

Spatium Gelatum 191202a presents a cut through the gelatine of such a form, highlighting the natural shape formations that result from the process of self-organization and internal tensions in the polymer surfaces (bending energy).

The work of Zbigniew Oksiuta brings together architecture, art, biology and space sciences in the investigation towards new possibilities of habitat. (see Media Lounge)

Biological Habitat, Form 0108: The three pieces and accompanying films on view in sk-interfaces are different manifestations of Zbigniew Oksiuta’s work with biological materials to develop conditions for future habitats.
His constructions use the processes of self-organization and internal tensions of semi- permeable polymer surfaces to form shapes, aiming to neutralize the dramatic contrast between inside and outside through conditions of simulated zero gravity or neutral buoyancy.

Drawing on the principle of living systems that emerge out of protective liquid membranes,Oksiuta’s architectural constructs generate forms in which ‘the borderline separating the interior from the outer environment is not a foreign body, made of neutral material (like Petri dishes or glass containers), but an element of the whole structure. It is simultaneously a boundary and a spatial scaffold. It plays an active role in the processes inside the system.’

While the building of large-scale fluid but stable forms is impossible in the earth’s gravitational field, Oksiuta attempts to create such forms in conditions of weightlessness: underwater, or potentially, in outer space, where suitable conditions for the growth of soft membranes can be found.