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Anthropogenic Cliff-Face
SPATIAL
To the organisms that colonise it, a glass tower or limestone façade is just a vertical habitat — a man-made cliff face. Viewing buildings this way explains why they attract the same hardy, extreme-loving life found on real cliffs and rock. It is the lens that lets us anticipate what will grow where, and treat an elevation as the ecosystem it actually is.
The Anthropogenic Cliff-Face is the ATH conception of the modern built surface as a distinct biological habitat — concrete canyons, glass monoliths and limestone façades treated as vertical analogues of natural cliffs and extreme environments. Studied under NEMCE, it selects for extremophilic colonisers: xerophilic cyanobacteria capable of poikilohydry (surviving total desiccation), UV-screening pigmented algae such as Trentepohlia, and other organisms adapted to high stress, scarce water and intense radiation. The concept reframes a building elevation as an ecosystem with its own selective pressures, which the COSMOS engine maps and the Sovereign Protocols target.
vertical extremophilic biome, microbial wind tunnel
The Anthropogenic Cliff-Face is the ATH conception of the modern built surface as a distinct biological habitat — concrete canyons, glass monoliths and limestone façades treated as vertical analogues of natural cliffs and extreme environments. Studied under NEMCE, it selects for extremophilic colonisers: xerophilic cyanobacteria capable of poikilohydry (surviving total desiccation), UV-screening pigmented algae such as Trentepohlia, and other organisms adapted to high stress, scarce water and intense radiation. The concept reframes a building elevation as an ecosystem with its own selective pressures, which the COSMOS engine maps and the Sovereign Protocols target.
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