Proto/e/co/logics

The conference organized by Croatian architects Alisa Andrasek and Bruno Juricic moves to transcend simplistic visions of contemporary ecology.

Proto/e/co/logics: speculative materialism in architecture, a summer symposium curated by Croatian architects Alisa Andrasek and Bruno Juricic, and staged in the beautiful setting of the Rovinj archipelago on the Istrian coast, aimed to 'tease out speculative directions for architecture beyond innocent and reductive approaches to ecology.' The focus for Andrasek, co-founder of biothing in London, and Juricic, was on architects finding an agency within nature, 'a condition that is already artificial', embracing the complexity of society.

Recent tendencies have indeed taken a unique set of positions, driven by mathematical and computational abstractions, as the duo observe, transforming the ways in which architects consider the 'matter-information relationship'. Now that matter itself is perceived as an active agent, and greenwashing is so common, what kind of architectural speculation strategies in relation to 'denaturalised material ecology'—bearing in mind nature's modes of behaviour from generative beauty to utter disequilibrium—are desirable?

Top: François Roche, co-founder of Roche & Sie. Above: Alisa Andrasek, co-curator of the conference with Bruno Juricic.

This was a provocative question to pose in this remarkably unspoilt region of Croatia of wild calmness, with its pine forests, deserted places, town parks, which after the end of the Napoleonic wars has become a destination for those seeking balneological spas and walking in nature, with a nudist colony on Koversada island. It was also a question posed to a mainly architectural audience, but a debate that carries wide implications for communities around the world. For Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, co-founder of Atelier Bow-Wow in Tokyo, who has researched symptoms of complexity, in Japan's post-traumatic conditions typologies have been transcended by multi-modal hubs, not as megastructures, but as micro public spaces. Japanese architects, in the aftermath of widespread destruction, are especially interested in citizen participation and 'social construction'.

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, co-founder of Atelier Bow-Wow in Tokyo, has researched symptoms of complexity in Japan's post-traumatic conditions; typologies transcended by multi-modal hubs, not as megastructures, but as micro public spaces.

Urban designer and author Adrian Lahoud, whose work on strategies to rebuild war-torn regions homed in on the 'irreducible inequality of the world', wondering whether the common terminology of top down and bottom up interventions, as architectural metaphors, were not better considered as geological layers. Developing a 'more particlised language' was Andrasek's aim: 'weather isn't linear, so a linear solution is no good', since 'God is bad with numbers', added Lahoud. She wants an open-source synthesis so, for example, her work can engage more closely with physics and the behavioural patterns of nature's hidden fluxes. This is about 'how to engineer metaphysically, rather than metaphorically' as architecture is apt to do. With agent-based software, adaptive models can consider ingredients of a pre-masterplan in the geography of the local coastline, not as an abstraction, but to set in motion a topological responsiveness.

Now that matter itself is perceived as an active agent, and greenwashing is so common, what kind of architectural speculation strategies in relation to 'denaturalised material ecology' are desirable?

Croatian architects Alisa Andrasek and Bruno Juricic, curators of the symposium.

Patrik Schumacher, partner in Zaha Hadid Architects, and a proactive teacher and author, has written a great deal about architecture responding to complex societal conditions, and above all, their parametricist commitment in buildings and urban design to geometric field logics, coordinating separate elements in urban space, and creating a sense of seamless fluidity akin to natural systems. This idea is visually appreciated but less well understood as yet by a wider public and his concept of the inbuilt kinetic capacity of environments to reconfigure themselves in response to occupation patterns, has latent power. New names were needed for a new architecture; be aware of the variables of the global set up that cannot change, and the relationship between the hidden and the visible, he added. Similarly to Andrasek, he is keen to institute bio-morphic learning process to architecture; in which you 'need to feedback into urban systems'.

Adrian Lahoud, an urban planner and writer, is author of works on strategies to rebuild areas devastated by war.

Enric Ruiz-Geli, founder of Cloud 9, always 'goes back to the performance of nature, and its lightness. 'The industry is ready for complexity', he opined. 'Architecture is nature'. He has already convinced his client, Ferran Adrià at El Bulli Foundation in Catalonia, 'to get into particles.'

François Roche, co-founder of Roche & Sie, felt that 'it was hard to define what is nature and what is not', while for Juricic, 'there was a danger in renaturalising architecture.' Creating a bridge between the organic and inorganic, realism and idealism, required balance to retain specificity and tease out directions, because architectural agency exists within a condition that is already artificial. Schumacher opened up the intriguing issue of the new metabolism between city and countryside, before reaching back to examples of patterns of medieval towns and 'ideal' cities to support his argument that 'the built environment is an evolutionary process like the emergence of life.'

Sylvia Lavin, the architectural author and academic, commented on how little the word organic was used by speakers, while animals and adornment were central to Sanford Kwinter's foray into animism and tribe identity, rather than morphogenetic adaptations. Lavin's own talk was about how the medium has become ecological, exemplified by artists like Rist and Eliasson and architects such as Diller Scofidio Renfro.

The issue of the toxic urban was evoked well by architect Ed Keller, illustrated by Antonioni's Il Deserto Rosso, with Giuliana's (Monica Vitti) depressing exposure to the environmental malaise caused by a power plant, in the tragic play-off between the natural order and industrialization in the 1960s. Now, 'local germs of reflexivity' through architectural speculations can be synthesized via layers of universal agency. Architectural media tools should 'help democratic disseminations, pervert the system', Roche added. That thread was extended by philosopher Robin Mackay, looking at what it means to go beyond short-term architectural needs to provoke 'an interface between the bounded and the unbounded', by removing 'the filters imposed on data'.

Architecture is primordial, yet shaping it, Mackay went on to explain, was 'not about what we already know', since 'speculation is not empirically tested'. Nature, freed from the contingency of history, through scientific, yet not technocratic methods, could be seen, as Buckminster Fuller did with his Spaceship Earth, as part of a perfectable ecosystem. On the other hand, a system brings compromises; potentially 'cloning the local onto the global'. The philosopher Reza Negarestani, author of the novel Cyclonopedia, was unable to attend, but in a talk projected via Skype, he wondered whether ecology was possible after Copernicus. 'Too much (programming) code will kill you'. But Schumacher, who felt the philosopher's intervention was 'pre-Socratic', underlined the value of the 'connectivity that we (architects using code) experience, in its agency to generalize prototyping processes and give them agency in various different places in the world.

Patrik Schumacher, partner in Zaha Hadid Architects, and a proactive teacher and author, has written a great deal about architecture responding to complex societal conditions.

The high-octane subtleties of presentations mostly enthralled the public audience including students there for preliminary week-long workshops staged by Andrasek and Juricic, representing their respective teaching institutions, the Architectural Association in London and the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. In field work they developed prototypes for innovative sustainable development of the Istrian coast, with Manuele Gaioni, a student at the AA, for example, recalling Superstudio's use of the grid as a medium between what is nature and what is human, and developing with colleagues a more organic grid adapting local data.

The themes of interpenetration between matter and nature, and indigenous cultivation, were framed by the setting itself, Maistra's new Hotel Lone on a greenfield coastal site near the centre of Rovinj, a striking tri-faceted white structure with black, rhythmically tiered balconies penetrating a huge hall: the heart of flowing spaces including fine conference facilities. Designed by Zagreb-based architects 3LHD and a team of wholly local artists, graphic and product designers, it superbly symbolizes the 'pulling' of the beautiful surrounding natural setting inside.

The symposium, supported by the hotel group Maistra and Rovinj council, is part of initiatives by the locally founded MLAUS, the Mediterranean Laboratory for Architecture & Urban Strategies, to promote urban design and planning in the region, sustainably developed with a good symbiosis between the local natural contexts, weather conditions, cultural networks and industries (wine, food, crafts, tourism). In the setting of Istria—what one student called 'pretty much a virgin condition'—speculative design thoughts by this band of mostly global agents, embedded many seeds of natural logics. This intellectually enlivening event, along with its layers of philosophical, cinematic and anthropological references, was a biodynamic catalyst of a project that participant architects Tom Kovac and Bostjan Vuga hoped would be 'a source of stimulus for a new architectural production.'
Lucy Bullivant

Proto/e/co/logics

The conference organized by Croatian architects Alisa Andrasek and Bruno Juricic moves to transcend simplistic visions of contemporary ecology.

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