Archinect - Features

'Beauty Is a Measure of Ecological Intelligence'; A Conversation with ecoLogicStudio Founders Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto

2023-07-31T09:00:00-04:00

Against the backdrop of a frenzied AI discourse dominated by end-product tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto articulate a refreshing call to adventure. The two ecoLogicStudio founders have built their professional and academic careers at the intersection of computation and biology, allowing them to articulate a vision of artificial intelligence that, in their words, "is more like a slime mold, a spider's web, a microalgae colony, or a mycelium network." Here, the computational and biological find common ground in their use of patterns as meta-language; a commonality that, when pushed, invites both human and non-human designers to shape the built environment as an organism itself rather than a static entity enlivened only by our own mechanics.

For Pasquero and Poletto, this is no theoretical exercise. ecoLogicStudio has already won wide acclaim for its real-world applications of ecological systems in the built environment while also articulating ...

Syracuse B.Arch Students Genevieve Dominiak and Hannah Michaelson Explore the Architecture of Toxic Ecologies

2020-06-17T09:00:00-04:00

Genevieve Dominiak and Hannah Michaelson are students in Syracuse Univesity's School of Architecture B.Arch program. Archinect was able to connect with Dominaik and Michaelson to explore their final project The Hive: Coalescence with Unlikely Companions.

Along with guidance from their thesis advisors Daniele Profeta, Greg Corso, and Kyle Miller, the two students pose the question "how can architecture foster this collision of two ecologies: the human and [American's] toxic subculture? Both Dominaik and Michaelson were recognized by their university and received the 2019 Academic Year Research Grant for their project as well as the 2019 Summer Research Grant for an additional research venture titled Today’s Mythmakers, Tomorrow’s Narratives.

Archinect's Spotlight on 2020 Thesis Projects: 2020 has been an extraordinarily challenging year for architecture graduates. Students were displaced as schools shut down, academic communities had to adapt to a new virtual format, end-of-year cel...

Berenblum Busch Architects on Exploring the Constraints of Miami's Climate

2020-02-28T15:31:00-05:00

When running an architectural practice, most architects can attest to the profession's fair share of rewards and obstacles—many variables factor in starting and maintaining a practice, after all. For Miami-based duo Gustavo Berenblum and Claudia Busch of Berenblum Busch Architects, the decision to start their own firm stemmed from the 2008 recession. "Although the great recession was very much present in 2010, in a way, it created a space for us to breathe and think about the future. We decided then to do what we always dreamed of: to have our own firm," the duo explains.

For this week's Studio Snapshot, Archinect chats with Berenblum and Busch as they share how they stay focused and inspired while also working in a city that is as fast-paced as Miami. From their expertise in port design to accommodating Florida's environmental constraints, both architects express their passion for the profession and what keeps their firm going.

Screen/Print #70: Jack Self Revisits Biosphere II, the Most Infamous Earth Science Experiment in History

2019-01-31T11:29:00-05:00

The newest issue of MacGuffin Magazine, "The Ball," collects stories that appear disparate but for their fixation on the consolidating properties of the circular object (whether as the globe, the sphere, or the minimal-surface enclosure).

The Venice Biennale Swamp Pavilion, Part I: Swamp Radio

2018-08-15T13:36:00-04:00

Though Venice has been the home of the eponymous Biennale since 1895 and the site of Western trade since roughly 400 AD, its longer history as a swamp is often overlooked. Its parcel of land and sea in Northeast Italy is notably hot, humid and rife with mosquitos, and has been since time immemorial. The ecosystems that depends on its swampy soil and vapor are threatened by human settlement, which has made it one of the most popular tourist destinations in modern history.

The Swamp Pavilion, Lithuania's contribution to the 2018 Venice Biennale, is a networked effort to highlight the intersection of human and natural history present in Venice in the middle of what is commonly referred to as the 'Anthropocene.' Organized by Gediminas Urbonas and Nomeda Urbonas, the Swamp School has developed new theories and pedagogies in the format of a 'school,' through public interventions, field trips, workshops, lectures, discussions, chat channels and printed publications.

Its first of three inst...

The Medusae and the Migrant: Ala Tannir on the Ecology of Crisis in the Mediterranean

2018-06-21T11:55:00-04:00

Since the beginning of 2018 alone, 857 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean — more than five per day — fleeing war, political repression, economic hardship, and ecological crises. It is the deadliest migration route in the world. While the internal borders of the European Union have been made increasingly porous since the early 1990’s, the external borders have been progressively closed off, leaving the sea as the primary path to asylum. But the waters are rough, and migrants are often crammed on overpacked, unseaworthy vessels by opportunistic smugglers. Armed with remote sensing technologies, policing missions sent by the European states send many boats back. Others sink. Rescues — mandated by international maritime law — have become less and less frequent as European countries have instituted a complex set of laws that provide loopholes allowing the abdication of their responsibility. Nearly one in every fifty migrants attempting the journey does not make it.

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Environmentalism Matters for Architects — With or Without the Paris Agreement

2017-06-02T13:00:00-04:00

Yesterday, amidst the roses, magnolias, crabapples and Littleleaf lindens that populate the White House Rose Garden, the President announced that the United States will withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the landmark international climate agreement made last year and signed by every country in the world except Syria and Nicaragua.*

Screen/Print #52: Shela Sheikh Searches for New Political Vocabularies in 'And Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency'

2017-04-05T12:12:00-04:00

On November 8, 2016 Donald Trump won the US Presidential election. Just under a month later, the US Army Corps of Engineers temporarily halted the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline following large protests heavily covered by the media. These events frame Shela Sheikh’s essay “Translating Geontologies”, which contends with an emerging (or at least, for some, a newly visible) political landscape marked by “an insidious violence that is more often than not environmental and affecting the bodies of racialized subjects.”

Win ECO-MONOPOLY by playing for sustainability, not profit

2016-09-07T11:42:00-04:00

When the Parker Brothers' version of the game Monopoly was released in 1935, it was primarily a celebration of capitalism; players were encouraged to build as much high-priced real estate as they could by acquiring desirable tracts of land and then forcibly renting them out to unlucky arrivals. The goal was to bankrupt the other players, all the while dodging the slings and arrows of the often financially ruinous 'Chance' cards.

Timothy Morton on haunted architecture, dark ecology, and other objects

2016-03-11T14:29:00-05:00

“How you design a building directly is ecological awareness,” states Timothy Morton, Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. “And your design is a game that will inculcate all kinds of ecological awareness. So realize that and act accordingly...”

Architecture of the Anthropocene, Pt. 3: Getting Lost in the Ozone

2015-05-07T12:08:00-04:00

This is the third installment of the recurring feature Architecture of the Anthropocene, which explores the implications of the Anthropocene thesis for architecture. The Anthropocene is a contested name for "the era of geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate, and ecology of the earth."

Prior installments can be found here.

Between Sampling and Dowsing: Field Notes from GRNASFCK

2015-04-30T13:10:00-04:00

In case the name didn’t tip you off, let it be said that GRNASFCK is not your average landscape architecture studio. Whether producing disjointed travelogues in Celebration, Florida or organizing rallies for extremophile bacteria in San Francisco, GRNASFCK operates almost like an industrial dredge, unsettling easy or comfortable ideas about the relationship between architecture and ecology, and covering impressive conceptual (and geographic) ground.