Context

The author has a longstanding interest in ecology and aesthetics. According to Gregory Bateson in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), we live in a world populated by ecologies of mind, and our functioning as humans within these ecologies can only pass through a combination of logical and metalogical communication channels linking us with the world that we inhabit. For Bateson, ‘mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life’ (Bateson 1972). Bateson’s book is not an attack on traditional science, rather it underlines that reality consists of interlocking feedback loops and that through our rational understanding we are only partially able to grasp this, and consequently reality may be ‘pathogenically’ misread. Only by combining the conscious and unconscious grasp of complexity can we see the overall system and eventually figure out how to co-evolve.

The aesthetic becomes a means to establish a cybernetic conversation, within which human and non-human ecologies constitute co-evolutionary systems, a form of extended mind. Following Bateson’s reasoning, the contemporary philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Timothy Morton are particularly relevant. They each promote a view of ecology without nature, suggesting, albeit rather differently, a greater role for the aesthetic in the reframing of ecological issues. Their approach articulates the shift from a problem-solving framework to a cybernetic one.

Žižek, in his critique of the current condition, proposes what we may define a design-driven solution. He identifies our current condition with ‘disavowal’, arguing that we know very well what the threats of an imminent ecological catastrophe are but we still do not act energetically upon them because we cannot rationally believe them. That is why Žižek suggests that true ecologists should look for trash and not for trees, which is to say that they should look for the hidden by-products of our society rather than cover them in green propaganda.

Can the visual and spatial interaction of production through photosynthetic architecture allow a deeper reading of the ecological systems that surround us? Recent developments in evolutionary psychology, described by Anjan Chatterjee in The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art (2013), demonstrate that our sense of beauty and pleasure is part of a co-evolutionary system of our mind and the surrounding environment. In these terms, our sense of beauty and pleasure has evolved as a selective mechanism. Cultivating and enhancing it enables us to compensate and integrate our logical thinking to gain a more systemic view of our planet and the dramatic changes it is currently undergoing.

This lineage of projects seeks to illustrate how a renewed appreciation of beauty in architecture has evolved into an operational tool to design and measure its actual ecological intelligence. If we understand this potential, we can begin to see buildings as not necessarily finished on completion of their construction but as continuing and evolving organisms. The architect can now imagine and design new urban typologies and hybrid habitats for these emergent conditions.

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19–20 BioBombola home algae garden. Developed by ecoLogicStudio, 2020.