What If Nature Is the Architect?

Anna Liu and Tonkin Liu on designing with living systems, not against them

By RISE Design Studio

There is a question that sits quietly at the centre of serious architectural practice: what does a building owe to the world beyond its walls?

Anna Liu ARB RIBA FRSA, co-founder and director of Tonkin Liu, has spent two decades asking that question more rigorously than most. Her answer is not a manifesto. It is a method. And it challenges the profession to rethink not just what we build, but how we think before we build.

The structural logic of a mollusc shell: curvature, corrugation, and material economy working in concert. The geometric principles of shells like this one directly informed Tonkin Liu's Shell Lace Structure technique, developed with Arup and the Natural History Museum.

Beyond biomimicry: the shift to co-evolution

Biomimicry is a word that has been softened by overuse. At its weakest, it means applying a leaf pattern to a facade or citing a honeycomb when justifying a structural grid. Tonkin Liu's work operates at a fundamentally different register.

Anna Liu describes nature not as a library of forms to borrow from, but as a living collaborator: a system of interconnected intelligence that architecture must learn to move with, rather than impose upon. The word she uses is co-evolution. Buildings do not sit in landscapes. They participate in them. They interact with sunlight, rainfall, wind, growth, and wildlife. The question is whether that interaction is passive or intentional.

This framing shifts the design conversation from aesthetics to systems thinking. It demands that we ask, early and seriously, how a building will perform as part of a living environment across multiple timescales: not just over a practical lifespan of 60 years, but across seasonal cycles, ecological shifts, and generational change.

The ALPM process: asking questions nature has already answered

Tonkin Liu codified their design philosophy in a framework they call ALPM: Asking, Looking, Playing, Making. It is also the title of their RIBA-published book.

The process is straightforward in principle and disciplined in practice. Each project begins with systematic questioning: what is this, what does it do, how does it work, how is it made? These are not architectural questions alone. They are the questions a biologist might ask of a cell wall, or a materials scientist might ask of a shell. The act of looking involves genuinely studying natural systems, not for stylistic reference, but for structural and environmental logic.

This is where Tonkin Liu's work becomes technically significant. Their Shell Lace Structure technique, developed with engineers at Arup and scientists at the Natural History Museum, was not drawn from observation alone. It emerged from a decade of empirical research into mollusc shell geometry: how a shell achieves extraordinary structural stiffness from minimal material thickness through curvature, corrugation, and perforation. The result is a single-surface structural system, laser-cut from flat steel sheets, that spans significant distances at weights and material quantities that conventional approaches cannot match.

That technique has been applied to bridges, pavilions, and landmark towers. It has also been applied to a prototype tracheal stent, developed with medical specialists, where the geometric principles of a Calla Lily petal informed a device that can adapt to the unique physiology of each patient. The intellectual journey from a mollusc shell to a medical implant is not metaphorical. It is technical, rigorous, and transferable.

Regenerative architecture: a different benchmark

The sustainability conversation in architecture has, for too long, been framed around reduction. Reduce carbon, reduce energy demand, reduce waste. These are necessary targets. But Anna Liu argues they are not sufficient ones.

Regenerative architecture sets a higher benchmark. A regenerative building does not simply minimise its impact. It actively contributes to the systems it sits within: harvesting solar energy, managing water cycles, supporting biodiversity, strengthening community resilience. It does not create a debt to future generations. It creates a credit.

This is not a utopian position. It is a technical and strategic reorientation of priorities. Sunlight, rainfall, wind, and growth are what Anna Liu calls elements that nature gives generously and for free. Architecture that fails to harness them is leaving performance on the table. Architecture that actively designs with them can deliver buildings that improve with time, rather than degrading against a fixed specification.

De-siloing the profession

One of Anna Liu's most pointed observations is structural rather than philosophical. The architecture profession, she argues, mirrors the fragmentation of the natural sciences: geologists, biologists, physicists, and chemists operating in separate disciplines, rarely in genuine dialogue. Architects, engineers, specialists, and contractors work in parallel silos, each optimising within their domain, few asking what the integrated whole could be.

Tonkin Liu's response is constructive rather than polemical. Their practice spans architecture, sculpture, landscape, and research. They have collaborated with structural engineers, natural scientists, and medical specialists. They teach. They publish. They build exhibition structures at RIBA and submit competition entries that advance structural technique as much as design ideas.

The result is a body of work that consistently asks whether the problem, properly understood, might have a different shape than the one the brief started with.

Why this matters now

Anna Liu and Tonkin Liu have built something rare: a practice where intellectual rigour and built output are genuinely inseparable. The Shell Lace Structure is not a research project that occasionally produces buildings. It sits within a body of work that has won 23 RIBA Awards across 22 years, and has itself been applied across scales from a 40-metre tower in Manchester to a medical device smaller than a thumb.

What makes their work important beyond its own achievements is the question it puts to the wider profession. If nature has already solved, with extraordinary precision and economy, the problems of structure, environment, and resilience that architecture struggles with, then the discipline's task is not invention from scratch. It is translation: learning to read what living systems have already written, and finding the honesty and skill to build with it.

That is a harder and more serious ambition than the profession usually demands of itself. Anna Liu is one of the people demanding it.

RISE Design Studio is a London-based architecture, interior design, and sustainability practice. We share thinking from across the discipline that we find rigorous, generous, and worth engaging with. 

Designing with what nature already knows

At RISE, we believe the most intelligent buildings are not the ones that resist their environment. They are the ones that listen to it. Anna Liu and Tonkin Liu's work reminds us that nature is not a constraint to be mitigated. It is the most sophisticated design collaborator available to us, if we are willing to ask the right questions.

Whether you are thinking about a new home, a retrofit, or a project that asks something more of its site, we would welcome the conversation.

→ Email us at architects@risedesignstudio.co.uk
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