ecoLogicStudio is an architectural and urban design practice specialized in environmental design, urban self-sufficiency and building integrated nature.
SERVICES
We offer design services related to three main areas of competence:
-Design of novel architectures with integrated formal, ecological and material performance.
-Retrofitting of existing buildings or urban systems requiring formal, performative and ecologic upgrading.
-Design and development of bespoke building cladding prototypes of advanced environmental performance, integrating biological/living matter and producers of on-site energy/food.
MANIFESTO
After architecture... a new Nature!
We propose to redefine the “city” as a fertile terrain for breeding new practices for the synthesis of “agri-urban” ecosystems.
The notion of agri-urbanity establishes a link between the instant/immaterial of contemporary digital urbanity with the slow/material that is inextricably related to the rural condition. As these two regimes are correlated they resonate, generating new patterns of production and consumption; such patterns are representative of a new kind of ecologic city, an inherently dynamic and non-linear one; one that cannot be fully predicted, but that has to be experienced and must adjust in real time, day after day.
Within this paradigm we seek to develop a new agency for architecture, to be discovered from a direct engagement with the vitality of bottom-up eco-social systems and processes.
We adopt algorithmic and computational design methods to explore and simulate scenarios of convergence between a strategic and a tactical form of agency; the architect’s role oscillates between articulating tectonic solutions, coding urban protocols, breeding material effects, enabling future tendencies and framing their unfolding in space and time.
We are not satisfied with the current level of engagement of the discipline of architecture towards the global ecological crisis: we believe that a critical as well as active role for architecture is necessary in order for the discipline to have an impact; we believe this role can be achieved by refusing to hide into the production of fictional scenarios, and by engaging with the organisation of matter, energy and information across scales and regimes.
Multiscalarity is critical to this new systemic comprehension of architecture and the “city”; we can experiment with new regional planning protocols by for instance re-framing the growth or farming of micro-algal organism across natural habitats, inhibiting or stimulating their proliferation in the landscape or in custom designed artificial systems, while incubating the emergence of related business ecologies [see the Regional Algae Farm project presented later].
As we can only conceive what we can represent or draw, we seek to reinforce the relevance of drawing and model making as critical activities for architecture; however we need to constantly update and experiment with our drawing and proto-typing techniques to advance and sharpen architects’ ability to represent the vital flows of matter, information and energy that fuel every living ecology and that too often elude architectural representation.
The interaction among living systems can only be fully conceived and expressed in real-time, for this reason we design platforms that encourage real-time participatory experiment and we believe that perfomative models, temporary installations, pavilions and small public architectures have a renewed role in contemporary architecture, providing they are integrated in a larger co-action plan and therefore understood as site specific, contingent and prototypical apparatuses of experimentation.
BIO
ecoLogicStudio, is an architectural and urban design practice dedicated to bio-digital design for the definition of a new “ecology” of space and behavior. Founded in London in 2005 by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, the office has earned an international reputation for its innovative work on “systemic” design –,a method defined by the combination and integration of systemic thinking, computational design, biotechnology and prototyping.
