SYMBIOSIS SYSTEM

Sym[BIO]scape

Sym[BIO]scape is a bio-based design research project that aims to terraform the Earth based symbiotic and agent-based growth strategies. In the era of post-Anthropocene where technology and artificial intelligence compute, condition and construct our world, non-human architecture and unmanned factories are constantly occupying the rural areas and countryside. These machine landscapes emerge together with land degradation and the loss of vernacularity and architectural context. The project Sym[BIO]scape puts forward a manifesto towards the evolution of landscape infrastructure not only for land restoration and sustainable material production, but one that establishes a symbiotic system with the environment through energy harvesting and transformation, along with landscape reshaping and terraforming. This hybrid system combines two biological behaviours in its operating logic: the anthill strategy for the generation of porous scaffold structures and the mycelium strategy to support natural growth and soil sustainability. Both digital simulations and physical experiments are conducted to research the behaviour of ant colonies and the growth of mycelia. In addition, this is a self-assembling and self-renewable system, adaptive to the dynamic environment. Starting from the redistribution of the on-site material based on the behavioural pathways of ants, real-time data sensing and harvesting-through-machine learning strategy, it generates the porous scaffold structure as a host environment for mycelium growth.