Introductory Studio
Design for the Experience Age
Group 2 – Wet.Ware BCN
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Senior Faculty: Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto (EcoLogic Studio)
Computational Expert: Konstantinos Alexopoulos (EcoLogic Studio)

Ubiquitous computing enables us to decipher the Biopshere’s anthropogenic dimension, the so called Urbansphere. In the Anthropocene, we know our civilisation reached global impact because the machines that we built to sense it, tell us so. In this respect we are already in a post-anthropocenic condition, where the impact of artificial systems on the natural Biosphere is indeed global, but their agency is no longer entirely human. In the Anthropocene Age we therefore need more than ever a non-anthoropocentric mode of reasoning and deploying design technologies as the anthropocentrism immanent in their explorative mobilisation in architecture limits its operative scope.

In this design studio we will test the potential to bring at the core of architectural novelty the interdependence of digital and biological intelligence, by pairing algorithmically drawn (Minimized detour) with biologically grown (Physarum Polycephalum) minimal networks. We will try to observe the diagrammatic capacity of living systems in the process of growing and becoming part of a bio-digital assemblage or apparatus. We will train our sensibility at recognising patterns of reasoning across disciplines, materialities and technological regimes thus expanding our repertoire of aesthetic qualities.

These emerging qualities will be a measure of the progressively higher degrees of synthesis we will establish among the heterogeneous systems of Barcelona, reflecting an enhanced communication across its human and non-human realms. In Wet.Ware BCN we will introduce new spatial metrics to measure the city’s self-sufficiency, valuing what economists call “externalities” towards other social and ecological systems.

Methodologically it will imply questioning concepts such as zone, scale, typology and program which will evolve into high resolution bio-computational drawings of Barcelona’s future WetWare, its networks of ecological intelligence.

eLS_Bio.Tallinn