Dr. Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Design-Driven Construction for Regenerative Architecture.

She holds a First-Class Honours degree with 2 academic prizes from the University of Cambridge (Girton College), and a medical degree from the University of Oxford (The Queen’s College). She was admitted as a Member to the Royal College of New Zealand General Practitioners between 2005 and 2015 with a PhD in Architecture (2014) awarded by the University of London (Bartlett School of Architecture), which established the principles of ‘living’ technologies for architectural design.

Her work interrogates the transition from an industrial era of architectural design to an ecological one. Drawing together the fields of architectural design, natural and medical sciences, she develops “living” technologies within the practice of the built environment, which apply some of the characteristics of biological systems to perform work, to establish new standards for sustainable living. Bringing living technologies into proximity with architecture and design with biologically produced materials, like mycelium biocomposites, she looks for approaches that can radically change the impacts of human inhabitation on the environment, so our lifestyles are beneficial for living systems. Heralding an era of change, the implementation of ‘living’ technologies and biomaterials can fundamentally change the impact of the built environment on our living world, to reach new levels of sustainability where building impacts are aligned with the natural realm and are resilient against climate change.