london UNITED KINGDOM
AADRL, Architectural Association
critics: alisa ANDRASEK & jose SANCHEZ
suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
Blue (josé CADILHE, julia ALMEIDA, michail DESYLLAS, & salih TOPAL): This research is based on a conceptual approach toward synthetic ecologies—systems created to develop symbiotic relations with the environment. We view nature not as a given state or a pure and finished system, but as a complex organism that is continuously evolving and adapting to different conditions, which is contrary to the conservative and romantic notion that defines nature as a balanced order of self-reproduction in stasis.
Therefore, we explored how architecture can actively participate in the promotion of a better environment as well as the recomputation of complex ecological systems, augmenting and expanding its properties.
Highlighting alternative methods of fabrication through material behavioural computation, Natural Prosthesis emphasises self-organized and emergent processes while addressing social and political inputs as part of a vast definition of ecology, which sets the foundation for the proto(e)cological proposal.
Thus, architecture is not designed as a passive element but as a metabolic system, a catalyst of enabling new ways of looking at our territories and ideas of inhabitation. Ultimately, architecture becomes another living structure establishing a proactive dialogue with its surroundings and a platform that generates an artificial ecosystem – a synthetic producer of nature.
sP: What or who influenced this project?:
Blue: Konrad Wachsmann, Frei Otto, Mutsuro Sasaki, François Roche, and Robert Smithson.
sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?:
Blue: Timothy Morton, Achim Menges, Graham Harman, and Slavoj Zizek.
sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?:
Blue: Everybody that challenges and debates contemporary architecture.
Additional credits and links:
[Blue]
Master in Architecture & Urbanism AADRL, Architectural Association, London
Tutors: Alisa Andrasek and Jose Sanchez
