Models of the reassembled ecosystem

Concept models.

This thesis serves as a table to promote ecological design conversations with more than human actors, like plants, bacteria, and fungi, on a broader notion of metabolism but also reflects on the architecture that responds to this entangled paradigm. On our plates, we need to consider our responsibilities.

Approaching the notion of metabolism, I’ve critically reflected on how in the building industry - and similarly in the human body - a lot of effort is placed to hide the “processes of digestion” by making buildings look more simple, clean, dry, still, silent, by concealing all the networks of pipes, valves, filters, pumps, etc. that make them function.

Collective Digest, instead, celebrates those metabolic acts by making the hidden visible, and by transferring ‘metabolism’ qualities, like growth, decay, nutrient release, and digestion, to the domain of building and construction materials. As a consequence, the project’s interior ecologies expanded through smells, sounds, movements, temperatures, textures, rhythms, etc.

The project designs tangible connections between architecture and food, that are developed through different scales, from the microscale of the materials to the mesoscale of the occupation, opening larger questions at a macro territorial scale. The program has been designed as an ecosystem in a feedback chain of physiological exchanges, willing to provide, through architecture, a dialogic ground to respond to the alienation between people and their food provisions.

Throughout the project, I became more aware of how deeply intertwined our relationships with other species, and non-human entities are. I explored the importance of designing with a more-than-human perspective to design as co-inhabitants of the same complex ecological system. This was a reminder that we do not exist in isolation, and we never have. But designing for coexistence, as an entanglement that unfolds interspecies alliance, requires keeping in mind the needs and requirements of a heterogeneous assemblage of actors and, therefore, mediation and the acceptance of potential conflicts and partial failures.

The architecture that responds to this inquiry has an expressive capacity to metabolize, digest, and generate resources while reorganizing processes and systems, and imagining new rituals, materials, and spaces to support those needs. Collective Digest celebrates an architecture that is relational, reversible, heterogeneous, and plural, that operates beyond its formal definition, in relation, always, with Others.