KOOZ I would like to start with a few questions on the curatorial exhibition EDIBLE. How can architects successfully address multi-scalar challenges today, from the micro to the macro? In specific, what are the most important considerations on interspecies coexistence that architects should consider when addressing issues of circular economy?

LK The crossing between scales – addressing, as you suggest, multi-scalar challenges – was vital to the development of the curatorial exhibition. The spatial and existential connections between architecture and food surface in different scales: from the gut of our bodies to the ecology of territories and the technology of building systems. In the exhibition we also address three scales with different thematic entities: the micro-scale of materials “From brick to soil”, the macro-scale of large-scale territories “Food and geopolitics”, and the meso-scale of habitation the “Metabolic home”, where domestic programs are designed as ecosystems in a feedback chain of resource exchanges. From the micro to the macro, the projects range from material conversions to the dynamics of urban exchange and environmental flows.

KOOZ During the opening of the curatorial exhibition you explained the processes embedded within each room of the “Metabolic House”: hydrating, digesting, ingesting, producing and so on. These terms seem to allude to larger processes as well, even at a planetary scale. So to what extent the “Metabolic House” can be considered a metaphor, or a small-scale example of new models of planetary inhabitation?

LK We do not see the “Metabolic house” as a metaphor but, because it is very literal, there are alliances between different spaces of inhabitation and material changes. This definitely brings together a model that can be transferred to different scales.

However, the essence of the exhibition, the way that we have tried to organise it and design it, it does not look the same if you transfer it in different contexts. So if you understand microscopic material processes and planetary phenomena, or zones of conflict, or people, it is not the same as connecting your bathroom to your garden. With a change of scales there is always a shift in the different conflicts that emerge. This also applies to scaling up and down ecosystems because there are living processes involved. It is not the same as to question geometric similitude, where you change the shape from something small to something large. In short, if you enlarge this system there are very different ways that it has to perform and operate, and different frictions that one has to address.

In many ways, however, we understand the integrity of this project as an inter-scalar and inter-territorial project, and the “Metabolic house” showcases what these kinds of material alliances would look like in the habitation scale.

KOOZ During the exhibition’s opening you spoke about the “Archaeology of food and architecture”, that is also a section of the exhibition, and I immediately thought about ancient Roman archaeological sites. In many instances food waste and cooking utensils are found and showcased, and archaeologists use these very important buried remnants to retrace food habits of a specific population, their culture, social structure, and so on. I was therefore wondering, in light of a potential future archaeology of our time, what do you think archaeologists would think about our society and today’s food habits in Western countries?

LK This is such a fascinating question. In the past I have taught some studios on the archaeology of the future. For example, being in a future time and understanding the future as an archive and source of reflection, so this is an interesting approach.

Just to reflect on what they would think of what we do today, I think they would say we are idiots! Because how much waste we produce, how much we consume daily, or the way we inhabit the planet. All of this happens to feed the logistical machines of production, consumption and distribution rather than respond to the desires of humans and populations. This is definitely a problem, but how it can change is a very loaded topic that is imbued in economies, policies and politics change very slowly.

People ask us sometimes, are the technologies available to change the way in which we live? And we answer: Absolutely, there are. There are so many ways in which we can change the way that building systems are constructed, or design infrastructures that we recirculate, in short to build differently. However, the politics behind their implementation slow down the whole process. I think that another important part of this slowness is the changing of desires, like how public desire is crafted and shaped, and we decided to address this aspect through the different projects exhibited.

Ours is not just a moral position on what is right and what is wrong, what is sensible or not. We really tried to stimulate a desire to live differently. By designing a different scenario for architects, designers and the citizens of the planet, by crafting such desire we believe we could aspire to a better future and a better way to occupy the planet.

KOOZ Cookbooks and manuals play an important role in the exhibition. Why are they so important today?

LK We were interested in the format of the cookbook as a production manual, not just the culture it produces and what bodies are included in these processes, but as a kind of manual that does not have a definitive solution. When I was doing my PhD I was looking at certain cookbooks that were not actual cookbooks, they were instead architectural cookbooks. They were written by countercultural groups in the 60s and 70s, and they were unrelated to food, but they represented building processes as a kind of proto-computational manual, which means that they illustrated a series of steps that would present a process in a serial connection. Interestingly the user could miscalculate the steps and rather than follow the predefined linear process they could choose their own path. One of the key reflections that emerged from looking at these processes is that that they redefine design agency in many ways. The designer, instead of being an author, she becomes the editor of a process or of a system that can be co-directed by many people, by a community. We think that this is the kind of agency that will be produced in the future of architecture, where different authors will collaborate in different processes.

KOOZ In addition to EDIBLE you launched the Circular Block Vision Competition. How does the competition’s vision of circularity and reuse address the current climate crises from an architectural standpoint?

LK As we were developing the program for this competition during the Covid-19 pandemic, we became increasingly drawn to the notion of the mikrorayon (the residential micro-district of the former Soviet Union), relative to new forms of localization within a confined domestic radius. Carlos Moreno’s “15-minute city” idea, which became part of Anne Hidalgo’s re-election campaign in Paris, resonated with several other urban environments, while at the same time addressing in many ways climate change; it reflects the fragility of our production processes, our hubris for ceaseless growth and endless mobility, and finally, our accountability for how we occupy our planet. With the CIRCULAR BLOCK Vision Competition, our objective was to address contemporary issues and pressures to support imagined futures and spaces premised around circular systems in their resources and economy protocols—as well as in the cycling of their materials.

KOOZ Urban blocks are usually referred to as “mediators” so what’s the social, architectural, and even ecological value of urban blocks like those that you identified for the competition? Could sustainable practices suggested in the competition expand to other contexts?

LK The mikrorayon, which dates to the 1920s in the Soviet Union to address rapid urbanization, was defined as a semi-self-sufficient agglomeration of housing and other programs meant to serve approximately 6,000 to 10,000 residents for all their needs including food, education, leisure, and health centres. The impact of these types of large-scale housing developments is global, while the legacy that the mikrorayon left behindhas been stigmatized by the deterioration of the housing stock and its infrastructure, abandonment, as well as lack of social and economic protocols to foster community initiatives.

We saw the mikrorayon – the circular block – as an organizational vessel that enables the flow of materials, ideas, and people, yet we were also intrigued in how technical solutions may have political ramifications and provide vital spaces for urban communities. With the competition, we wanted to urge new types of engagements with urban infrastructure – beyond housing – and the aesthetic and experiential qualities of infrastructure, as well as ways in which it can be instrumentalized to foster creative design processes. We encouraged projects that investigate strategies and models for recirculating matter and energy based on principles of distribution and localization between infrastructural, architectural, and bodily scales.

Bio

Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer and scholar and an Assistant Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union in New York. She holds a Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, an SMArchS in design and building technology from M.I.T, as well as a Master of Arts and a PhD from Princeton University. She is the author of The Architecture of Closed Worlds (2018). Her research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology and environmental politics and more particularly on recycling material experiments, theories of waste and reuse, as well as closed and self-reliant systems and urban environments. Kallipoliti was the founder of EcoRedux, an innovative online open–source educational resource documenting the history of ecological experimentation in the twentieth century, and the principal of ANAcycle thinktank based in Brooklyn, New York [www.anacycle.com].

Francesca Romana Forlini is an architect, Ph.D, editor, writer and educator whose research is located at the intersection of feminism, cultural sociology and architectural history and theory. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the New York Institute of Technology and Parsons The New School in New York. She worked as chief editor at KoozArch, where she is currently a contributor. She is a Fulbrighter ed alumna of Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the RCA.