Active since 2010, the architecture lab theOtherDada defends an alternative position towards the current practice of sustainability through exploration of the context and medium, invoking new relationships between climate, landscape, and inhabitants. Informed by our research into biomimicry, we aim to connect to the natural ecosystems of sites to understand and consequently devise new potential living habitats. theOtherDada works within a collaborative process between architects, scientists, botanists, artists, economists and craftsmen.

Architecture of Exchange

Every environment an architect confronts consists of architecture; the existing.

Every site is meticulously organized and inhabited. Facing the complexity of this contemporary issue, our role lies in the thoughts of architectural impact by exploring the capabilities of context in producing new relationships.

To survey, observe, and register the existing state – its resources, organisms, humidity, winds, insolation, earth, eventual construct, and its usage – constitute the initial program we set preliminary to any constructive action. Informed by biomimicry researches, this extremely precise and demanding introspective method leads to reconsider the world differently: like a system of relationships, exchanges, and not like a system of isolated objects and actions. This generates new spatial experiments and living conditions that are more open, light and porous through invention of dynamic play between the interior and exterior; an intricate interdependency. We aim to criticize the defensive approach that forms the relationship between the living and the context. Whether one lives in Paris or Dubai, the brutal tendency towards obstruction and introversion are surprisingly the same.

If the future of architecture is directed towards sustainability, undisputable intention, a consensus is still a requisite. We believe that practices claiming to be sustainable only enhance the already abusive trend of a number of enterprises into Greenwashing. However, the sustainable has nothing to do with the appearance, it is an attitude. A curious and activist look directed on the existing/existent. A knowledgeable and happy relationship towards the pleasure of an environment with the potential to be transformed, linking new thought to habitation/ to produce new reasons to inhabit.