COLLECTIVE DIGEST

Acts of convivial metabolism

1. An introduction

2. Motivation

3. Approach

4. Site

5. Investigations

6. Design development

7. The dynamism of the space

8. Final thoughts

Collective Digest is dedicated to exploring and embracing how architecture is deeply connected to metabolic processes and qualities. By acknowledging and celebrating this consideration within an ecological paradigm, the project aims to rethink workflows, hierarchies, and, ultimately, aesthetics.

Through a transformation of Aarhus Slaughterhouse into a sustainable food facility, the project is designed to visualize the invisible metabolic relationships with more than human actors, like plants, bacteria, and fungi. The transformation restores the industrial legacy of the building and turns it inside out by inviting the public into the growing processes and the metabolic system, consequently blurring the distinction between technology and nature and production and leisure.

The project aims to critically evaluate food production while argu- ing for a new semantic recodification of urban processes reconnecting to a socio-biodiverse narrative through ecological design. An architecture that brings people to digest the importance of our food culture to better live in an entangled coexistence. ecologicaldesign:anapproachtodesignsocio-culturalsystemsalignedand harmoniouslyentangledwithecologicalsystems. regenerativesystem:processesthatrestore,reneworrevitalizetheirown sourcesofenergyandmaterials. coexist:existatthesametimeorinthesameplace. metabolism:thesumofthechemicalreactionsthattakeplacewithinalivingorganism.

*WORDLIST convivial:friendly,lively,andenjoyable.

This thesis report is a collected assemblage of research, process, and creation material, which I have accumulated over the semester. Served as a menu, it is structured into three parts (corresponding to three stages of a meal):

First Course: The ingredients - the stage of learning

Main Course: The journey - the stage of developing

Dessert: The proposal - the stage of reflection

Note: During the semester, I have collected my process into side dishes summarizing various investigation phases. These side dishes are illustrated as exported spreads throughout the report.

Side dish index:

A: Challenges of global food production

B: Case studies

C: The slaughterhouse

D: Material experiments

E: Process cards

As species, we are standing at the crossroad facing countless environmental, political, social, and economic challenges. There is a desperate urgency to make the externalities that threaten our survival more visible, tangible, and digestible. Food offers an accessible way in which to think about this. Since ancient times and across cultures, countries, and generations, food has been integral to our identity. Through food, we gather around as a collective. What if, in this collective, we would start to digest the Anthropocene?

Today, most food production has been industrialized by globally operating and state-funded farming companies. Therefore, it can be hard to see the complex supply chains that transport food from the countryside, where it is produced, to our urban markets, supermarkets, kitchens, and tables. However, whether or not we see it, food’s influence is everywhere: in our bodies, cities, homes, habits, politics, economics, and climate. We live in a world shaped by food: a place Carylon Steep calls’ sitopia’ (from Greek sitos, food + topos, place) in her book “Sitopia - How Food Can Save the World.” Climate change, deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, pollution, mass extinction, diet-related disease, and global pandemics are just some of the ‘externalities’ of how we eat. We need to understand the massive impact current food infrastructures have on us to exist on this overcrowded and overheating planet. Steep concludes: “Sitopia is not utopia; yet by valuing food and consciously shaping the world through it, we can come close to the utopian dream of a healthy, fair, and resilient society.”

(Re)discovering the hidden infrastructures of food encourages us to be more present in our surroundings, recognizing our relationship with all living organisms. This thesis serves as a table to promote conversations with more than human actors, like plants, algae, bacteria, and fungi, on a broader notion of metabolism. On our plate, we need to consider our responsibilities.

As Rosi Braidotti claims in the book “Posthuman glossary,” we need to break the bubble of the Anthropocene and blend the boundaries between humans, machines, and nature. Only with a collective effort of imagination, turned into tangible actions, can we create a convivial framework of ecological and social justice.

Speculative design

To be speculating through design is to design a question instead of an answer. Speculative futures exist as projections of the lineage in the future. The alternative reality presents a shift from the line at some point in the past to re-imagine our technological present. It is a discursive practice based on critical thinking and dialogue, which questions design practice (and its modernist definition). However, the speculative design approach takes the critical practice one step further towards imagination and visions of possible scenarios.

food manufacturing agriculture plants feed humans micro-organisms that produce architectural fragments biomaterials computer monitoring agriculture crops with longer life self-sustaining agriculture humans feeds plants