Bio-digital architectures promote a new urban aesthetic centred around a novel appreciation for the micro-scale of bacteria as well as other forms of non-human intelligence.
by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto
published in Architectural Design, Volume 89, Issue 5, by John Wiley and Sons, p. 58-65
By incorporating living micro-organisms within architecture, London-based ecoLogicStudio have found ways to read their evolving appearance as a measure of environmental value. Practice partners Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto combine this approach with digital techniques to create arresting architectural assimilations of the organic and the inorganic that celebrate the beauty of non-human intelligence.
It is timely in the Anthropocene, more than ever before, to search for a non-anthropocentric mode of reasoning, and consequently also of designing. The new Photosynthetica Consortium, established in 2018 and including London-based ecoLogicStudio, the Urban Morphogenesis Lab (Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL)) and the Synthetic Landscape Lab (University of Innsbruck, Austria), has therefore been pursuing architecture as a research-based practice, exploring the interdependence of digital and biological intelligence in design by working directly with non-human living organisms.