Biodesign in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Claudia Pasquero;Marco Poletto; & Marco Poletto

Author:Claudia Pasquero;Marco Poletto; & Marco Poletto
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Projects 1.03

CYBER-GARDENING THE CITY

1.03.01 Urban Algae Canopy, the Metropolitan proto-Garden

1.03.02 Urban Algae Folly, the Aarhus Wet City plan

1.03.03 AirBubble COP26

Close-up view of the photosynthetic Urban Algae Canopy shading the main public space of the Future Food District at the Milan EXPO2015. The Urban Algae Canopy is a bio-digital living pavilion converting solar energy into biomass and oxygen.

1.03.01

Urban Algae Canopy and the Milan Metropolitan proto-Garden

ecoLogicStudio first developed a set of operational fields for Milan in the project ‘Metropolitan proto-Garden’. The project comprised a video installation commissioned by Luca Molinari that engaged with discussions around the masterplan for Expo 2015 that had been proposed by the advisory team of Stefano Boeri, Richard Burdett, Jacques Herzog, Joan Busquets and William McDonough.

ecoLogicStudio employed the concept of a diffuse Expo and proposed a new infrastructure of advanced urban gardening stations, all equipped with digital sensing and actuating mechanisms and fitted with synthetically engineered microalgae colonies; collectively such prototypical assemblages formed a Metropolitan proto-Garden capable of reactivating and re-metabolising Milan’s network of farms and its historically productive landscapes.

The Metropolitan proto-Garden challenges the separation between the urban and the rural condition as well as the separation between urban networks and urban landscape. The existing urban morphology of Milan is augmented with realtime simulations of air pollution, vegetation density, wetness and access via public transportation, depicting new fields of opportunity for breeding a distributed network of biotechnological gardens. Presented as an open-source interface, the Metropolitan proto-Garden simulates, visualises and operates this new biotechnological stratum in real time.

For example, the relationship between air pollution and the uncontrolled proliferation of microalgae colonies that currently grow in the waterways of the city would be managed and exploited to promote urban enhanced photosynthesis, urban oxygenation and biomass production for both food and biofuel. Such bio-digital mechanisms can feed on what we now consider urban waste or pollution, thereby activating new pollution-to-food feedback loops, significantly affecting the overall urban metabolism, and reducing its footprint. Social groups and other active stakeholders can register for one of the many virtual plots that algorithmically subdivide the territory of Milan and thereby actively develop interest in specific forms of cultivation. Various descriptors (enabled by ubiquitous data-logging) provide an account of the material processes that are channelled through each plot and influence directly the urban cultivation process.

As the plots evolve into proto-Gardens, new urban systems emerge from a process of actualisation of latent social, economic and ecologic potentials. Cultivation evolves into a process of culturalisation. These potentials are recognised through the framework of the virtual plots and the computation and plotting of the related operational fields; their actualisation in a multitude of forms, spatial conditions and social communities is catalysed by the introduction of new prototypical urban and architectural devices. These devices are characterised by a specific set of performances (evapo-transpiration, photosynthesis, carbon sequestration, etc.) engineered in the form of specific material organisations or systems (branching, folding, weaving). The systems are embedded with remote sensing and actuating potential (temperature, pH, radiation, proximity, etc.) and interfaced with a simulation engine (digital interface).

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