IS.1 – Introductory Studio G.2
ACTIVE PUBLIC SPACE
Senior Faculty:  Claudia Pasquero, Carmelo Zappulla
Faculty assistant: Maria Kuptsova

Eco-machines are back
‘[…] mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; […]’
G. Bateson STEPS TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF MIND p.146

In an age of unprecedented interaction between the natural and the artificial realms we are confronted with the necessity to develop instruments of transformation equipped with an embedded capacity of constant adaptation and self evaluation.As nature is becoming more and more hybridized with embedded artificiality, the ethical paradigm of natural conservation is progressively losing its value and needs to be replaced with more adaptive mechanisms of management and direct evaluation of the effects of human transformation of natural ecosystems; we call this mechanism eco-machines.

Project: Bio-Rock
Jonathan Irawan / Lalin Keyvan / Robert Staples / Christopher Wong / Abdullah Ibrahim / Luis Bonilla

Eco-Machines provide a material and operational framework to deal with change and transformation, the two main defining qualities of our new understanding of urban ecology; moreover they support interaction between heterogeneous systems, such as social, infrastructural, architectural and environmental ones; they allow us to sense, register and manipulate in our daily life the unfolding processes defining our cities, our houses and our artificial environments. Eco-Machines turns us all into ecologists in the most operational sense of the term.
Starting from the design research carried on by the studio in the past two years, we will look at mechanisms of local energy, food and bio-materials production in dense urban environment, focusing on how these bottom up processes of production could contributed to the urban morphogenesis of contemporary cities