You ever sit around staring at your little tank of Sea Monkeys wondering when they're going to build a civilization and massive rectangular buildings in your honor? Yeah, me too, but they never do. Come to think of it, nothing in nature looks like our cities' squared-off jagged silhouettes that more closely resemble a Windows 95 music visualization than something living. Why?That's the question MItchell Joachim has dedicated himself to answering. Joachim is an architect at Terreform ONE / Planetary ONE, a Brooklyn-based architecture firm that is the first of its kind to work in tandem with a biology lab. His goal is to reimagine how we build our cities, to move away from the cold, inorganic steel we've come to rely on and toward large-scale development of organic architecture. As part of our Upgrade series produced last year, we talked to Joachim about creating living architecture.But Joachim, a TED fellow whom Wired once called "one of the fifteen people the president should listen to," hasn't simply tasked himself with convincing rich corporate dudes to model their headquarters into a Dr. Suessian dreamscape. Instead, he's pushing to use organic and synthetic materials to create cities that are designed to be more natural (in the most literal sense) and less wasteful. By cutting out metal boxes and sprawling 'burbs, Joachim and his team plan on developing a future in which our exploding cities don't feel quite so big.