Autopoiesis is a concept first articulated in the 1970s by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to describe the defining feature of living systems. From the Greek for “self-making,” it refers to the way living organisms continually produce and maintain themselves, including their components, boundaries, and processes, through their own internal operations. A cell, for example, regenerates its membrane, enzymes, and structures in an ongoing cycle that sustains its identity.
The idea soon traveled beyond biology. Systems thinkers, philosophers, and cultural theorists began to use autopoiesis as a way of describing how societies, languages, artworks, or even digital platforms reproduce themselves through feedback and relation. The term resonated with poststructuralist and ecological thought, suggesting that meaning, identity, and form arise less from external control and more from self-organizing patterns.
Autopoiesis challenges linear notions of creation by showing that life is a recursive loop of becoming. For art and architecture, the concept has inspired works that treat structures as dynamic processes rather than fixed objects, and communities as living systems that grow, adapt, and sustain themselves from within. Autopoiesis invites us to see worlds, whether biological, cultural, or ecological, as alive in their own continual self-making.
Image from Sustainability Directory.
