Microorganisms, humans, and architecture have always been intrinsically intertwined, but their relationships haven’t always been fully understood. It’s a history of life, death, and intertwined evolutions shaped by numerous intimate entanglements at various scales and times. Perhaps the climate crisis represents the perfect moment to change our canonical paradigms of understanding a more-than-human relationship, allowing us to better understand architecture’s limits and potentialities, defining its possible new roles.

This conversation is part of KoozArch's issue "Terra Infirma."

VALERIO FRANZONE / KOOZYour various forms of practice intersect at several points, tackling the relationships between microorganisms, humans, and the built environment: pathogens, feces, and fermentation wrote the first more-than-human architectural history. What led you to focus on these relationships?

BEATRIZ COLOMINAThe issue of health and architecture has always been my obsession because they have been constantly intertwined since the beginning of architectural theory. Today, health is thought in terms of the microbiome, the trillions of microbes that inhabit us, feed us, maintain us, and defend us. This is today understood at a general level of health but not so much in architecture. Many of the diseases of our time — obesity, diabetes, many forms of cancers, autoimmune disorders, allergies, autism and more — are now understood as the consequence of the diminishing diversity of bacteria. And architecture is implicated. Architecture has been thoroughly involved in this diminishing of the human microbiome. In 2019, I was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg (an Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin) researching tuberculosis and modern architecture, and many scientists there kept asking me when architecture stopped being interested in science and medicine. I said, "Well, maybe antibiotics killed that intimate connection that architects had with doctors at the turn of the century when people were dying of tuberculosis." But now, we are in a different situation. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria threaten our species, motivating us to connect again with medical research and microbiologists to think about how bacteria can help the survival of our species and the planet, which are so intimately connected.

KOOZThis discourse on antibiotics is fundamental because they are widely used, released into the environment; they enter the food chain and affect all living beings.

BCExactly, and people understand it — but they don’t understand how architecture contributes to reducing the diversity of bacteria through hermetic buildings. Le Corbusier proudly talks about entirely sealed buildings with air conditioning systems purifying the dirty, outside air. But neither he nor anybody else understood that these sealed buildings lead to many problems, starting with Sick Building Syndrome. Many of the most dangerous bacteria are now in these immaculate, closed environments — like hospitals, which have become very dangerous.

KOOZ Orkan, what about you?

ORKAN TELHANI did my PhD at the architecture department of MIT, researching the intersection of synthetic biology, computation, and design to understand why we prioritise building outside the human body instead of into it. There's a significant bias between the outside, the exteriority, and the inside, the interiority, which is under-theorised and acknowledged by designers. It's a spatial question within biomedical design, but architects don’t consider our interiors a place to design. On the contrary, synthetic biology has a particular way of thinking about the body. So I moved into it and started considering the cells as enclosures, archetypal architectures — and investigating what it means to design inside the human body. Soon, the gut immediately became a meta-architecture for me where many different species coexist. This cosmopolitical space defines our identity and relationship with the environment: a continuum from a cell to a microorganism and the microbiome. I started building incubators and machines to culture cells to produce food supplements or prosthetics and build new relationships with that world. Food became a tool or a medium to design the microbiome and the human body from within. That's also when, in 2016, I met Mark and Beatriz, who were curating the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial.¹ This work then continued through the collaborations with Uriel, revolving around the outside-inside relationship.

KOOZ Uriel, how did you start researching and experimenting with microbes?

URIEL FOGUÉ / ELII We love Isabelle Stengers’s text where she describes Gaia (the “living planet”) as “the product of a history of continuous coevolution, whose first artisans and true authors are the innumerable peoples of microorganisms”.² While humans tend to think that we transform the world with architectures, infrastructures, technology and so on, other inhabitants and artisans such as microorganisms build other worlds. These other “neighbours” (maybe other “architects”?) slowly but surely configure all those other worlds (which are also ours). We often read the history of architecture as a process of human transformation, forgetting that this “worlding” is done and redone co-dependently with others. As architects, we at elii soon realised we could not tackle these problems alone. We were not trained to understand how those others — such as microorganisms — build this world of many worlds in which we live, or how our practices are inscribed in those co-evolutionary processes. That is why in 2018 we invited Orkan to collaborate on a project. His answers, vocabularies and logics allowed him to address spatial issues in a way that shocked us and caused us to understand our practice in a very different way. Since then we have worked together on different occasions, generating a very fruitful synergy in what we like to think of as ‘architectures for microorganisms’.

Still, my personal interest in these issues was born at home. My parents are doctors. I learned from them that hospitals are atmospheres that heal and, paradoxically, produce illnesses that exist nowhere else but inside these prophylactic architectures.

KOOZ Finally, Mark?

MARK WIGLEY At one level, it happened for me in 2016 when we curated Are We Human — the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial and the accompanying book.³ This was a project developing a trans-scalar argument repositioning the human as a relatively insignificant creature in a cosmic sense. Part of that project to decenter the human explored the microbiome and recalibrated the scales architects must consider. Yet even if we all have respect and affection for microbes in this discussion, we don't truly know what they are. Architects have been brilliant at not talking about microbes for a very long time; they always say they're interested in life and living architecture — but they are never really interested in the strangeness that is life, selective evolution, symbiotic entanglements, extinctions, death, mutual extractions and so on. And, of course, architecture is actually mobilised for extinction, extraction, and various forms of death — the very things that the discourse avoids. Architecture is ultimately a genetic project. As a theorist, I always wonder what architecture is: it's not a thing but a verb, a possible way of living-dying together with others.Today’s most urgent act is to respect and embrace microbes, to see architecture differently and understand our intimate relationships with them, understanding especially that we are them. Our current project suggests that the history of architecture is the history of an ever more extreme resistance to microbes, culminating in modern architecture’s antibiotic and prophylactic philosophy. Architecture — from the beginning, but especially now — isolates humans from most other life forms. In that sense, architecture is a crucial part of human exceptionalism, an ultimately suicidal philosophy. So, the question we ask is, what kind of counter-architecture would follow from reducing the resistance to bacteria, and looking at it conceptually, philosophically, technically, artistically, and archaeologically? What if we collaborate with the microbes, who are the real architects of our bodies and brains, and the real clients of the built environment?

MWAnd to bring that repressed microbial world back to the light is to affirm life. After all, bacteria are the first form of life; they built all the other forms of life and the environment in which we live. It’s remarkable that architecture maintains such a distance from that.

OTIn the continuum of species, bacteria is an interrelationship, one species that took responsibility for becoming an ecological actor in relationship to everything else. We have a lot of bacteria in our bodies, and that's why we are more tuned to say that bacteria create our behaviours and everything, but actually, bacteria is a tiny bit of that actor; it's part of a continuum of complex biological and chemical interactions. However, architects and even the medical profession always try to avoid, escape, or underestimate the processuality of bacteria. Modern architecture is like the invention of soap; it washed away bacteria. On the other hand, if you now focus everything on the bacteria, it creates a speciesism by selecting one species over the other. Our body also hosts viruses, and now there's a big fight against viruses. However, the lack of viruses will be the next antibiotic crisis because we will not eliminate them all, and some will survive and become more deadly.

KOOZ I agree that this relationship between architecture and health has a long history; even Vitruvius tackled it in his De Architectura.

BC Yes, but it starts long before that. Tuberculosis already appeared in the Neolithic era when humans began living in buildings, which produced conditions for diseases that did not exist before. There is no architecture without disease. One could write a history of architecture and of the city as a history of disease, of a series of epidemics and of measures to counter them. Consider the infrastructure put in place in cities in the nineteenth century to bring clean water, sewage systems, urban parks and so on with the new codes of light, ventilation, and hygiene to counter the epidemic diseases of cholera, typhoid fever, etc. Cities were literally rebuilt in the name of disease. But paradoxically, while architecture fights disease, it creates conditions for new diseases — as is evident in modern architecture.

KOOZ True. If architecture and urbanisation were born to protect us from natural dangers and other humans, ironically, they have also become the primary vehicle for spreading diseases. Recently, COVID-19 perpetuated this affinity. The built environment — our colonisation of nature — allowed for the spread of a virus that changed our cohabitation models. Still, we have already forgotten it and become potential victims of another possible pandemic. What is going wrong with architecture and urbanisation?

UF / ELII What if we move from "architecture as protection" to "architecture as mediation"? If we understand architecture as a complex articulation of this coexistence among species, and we accept that it is a process in constant change, then we could think of COVID as a challenge to the design of this intra-action process and radical proof that “architecture as prophylaxis” has always been a modern myth. But if we frame it as a matter of coexistence, assuming every coexistence is conflictive and controversial, we have to readjust our protocols on how to articulate space.

Let’s look at it the other way around: microorganisms have always been part of our daily lives. They collaborate with cooks to make bread, yoghurt and beer. Urban planners build sophisticated sewage systems to tout a particular form of coexistence of humans and microorganisms, on an urban scale, by implementing sanitary and hygienic policies. However, this articulation has usually favoured only human interests. So, these are the forms of anthropocentric articulation that need to be questioned. Maybe human history doesn't acknowledge the complexity of these shared Cosmos. We need to rethink what counts as historical and acknowledge all these other bio-geo-stories on both micro- and macro- scales to rethink our coexistence within microorganisms. For example, in Microbial Fruits of Istanbul⁴ we tried to imagine a space that tells the complex stories of Istanbul from the microbes’ perspective, radically changing our understanding of public spaces.

KOOZ It’s an interesting philosophical perspective, but what is the historical trajectory of this relationship?

BC There has always been an antibacterial attitude. The philosophical ideas of health and architecture evolved, and we are in a different model from, for example, when the peste bubbonica was spreading in Europe and Asia from the 14th century on. COVID was shocking, 7 million people died, but it is nothing compared to the brutality of the plague with one third of the population wiped out. The way architecture puts structures in place to contain diseases is a crucial part of architectural history. Now, we can discuss coexistence with microbes, but imagine it when half of the population dies: coexistence is death. We went from that uncontrollable situation to one in which we use antibiotics, antivirals, and other defensive means. Now we're in a position to say coexistence is a better path. That does not mean eliminating antibiotics or modern architecture completely. It does not mean living in an unhygienic situation either. It means enriching the microbial environment. The reality is that, historically, our vision of the world changed, and that's how, in this moment of incredible crisis of the planet, we start also reconsidering the human exceptionalism mentioned before. But until a while ago, nobody had such an approach, even when we began teaching architecture in the 80s.

UF / ELII When we talk about coexistence, we are not referring to a goal or a peaceful ‘happy ending’, but to how different actors share living conditions. Coexistence can be super controversial and peste bubbonica was an adverse condition for humans.

OT We should talk about dependency. Humans do not acknowledge enough that they depend on a particular way of living with microorganisms and our relationship is shaped by illusions of control. We think we can control the environment or our relationships with organisms. After COVID, we started to admit more and more that humans are less powerful than we think. Our survival depends on our ability to be in tune with the environment.

KOOZYes, we are not so powerful, and our cohabitation models affect our weaknesses. Our cities facilitate these pandemics; it's a historical fact depending on the high concentration of bodies.

OT Yes, but the problem is also that the human condition in the 21st century is based on mobility: hundreds of millions of people are continually displacing things, including bacteria and viruses, making containment an illusion.

MW This may be a moment to return to that word, cosmopolitics, because humans are an ecosystem occupied by thousands of microbial species. The human ecosystem is a mobile transspecies collaboration. If we think about the internal cosmopolitics that constitutes humans as microbial cities and how they interact with other human and more-than-human mobile cities and with actual cities, what's impressive about epidemic diseases is not competition but coevolution: both humans and the tuberculosis bacillus survived. Which is remarkable. If the bacteria is a too-efficient killer, it will not survive. Both microbes and humans adjusted themselves to survive and architecture moderates this coevolution, making it possible for tuberculosis to continue today. Architecture still hosts bacteria that both defend and kill people. It's a very delicate balance. The first Neolithic houses, for example, can be understood as genetic experiments where most things were excluded and a small set of certain species — animals, plants, and humans — were invited to occupy intimate spaces together. If architecture has enabled coevolution, let's understand how it behaves in these complex politics, moderating a multitude of selective pressures. The philosophy of exclusion should be replaced by a philosophy of inclusion, which is not a simple binary.

BC COVID — whose new variants are less lethal, guaranteeing the virus’s survival — is another example of this coevolution. If we all die, the virus will lose its home. There’s a constant dance between humans and bacteria or viruses.

OTTemporal relationships also shape coevolution because the main difference between humans and microorganisms is the pace of evolution. Humans are a slow species who cannot diversify against environmental adversities fast enough. Living longer comes with a cost.

BC It’s interesting that you brought this up; currently, there is the fear that with the permafrost melting, ancient bacteria and viruses will be awakened, and we will not have any defense against them.

MW We could be wiped out or become something else. Some of the bacteria that are millions of years old swimming inside us might make some interesting alliance with their defrosted cousins. Or maybe we are finally wiped out to reduce the human contribution to climate change. It could be a plan to reboot the planet.

KOOZ Yes, let’s talk about the planet because — following Andrés Jaque’s notion of transscalarity — there’s an exciting shift from bacteria affecting our bodies to humans affecting the Earth: the metabolic process of digestion starts in our guts and continues in the sewage infrastructures. It’s a more-than-human and metabolic story that connects us to the planet ecologically and politically. Living in the Anthropocene, how should we change our approach to waste — another production system — and to both multispecies and human cohabitations?

UF / ELII In these projects with Orkan we have learned that a lot of the processes we had assigned to the urban field (like the loss of biodiversity, gentrification, and climate change) also happen at the same time and in parallel in our guts. Although this was a discovery for us architects, it came as no surprise to people familiar with the microbiological world: “It's not that strange; after all, we are all architectures for microorganisms”. In Istanbul in particular, through the analysis of the microbes in the bostans, we understood that gentrification processes were happening simultaneously in the city, in those gardens and in our intestines. Indeed, from an ecological and microbiological approach, the difference between a garden and a human is not so vast.

Returning to your question on waste, we have confirmed some of these ideas in another project developed with Maria Jerez,Ca.Ca. (Cannibal Carnival).⁵ From an ecological point of view, there is no such thing as waste: everything we toss out can be valuable and usable for other beings. It is a feast! A constant choreography of exchanges! If you suspend the idea of human exceptionalism, it's a cannibal carnival.

MW As Uriel says, there is no waste on the planet; we could look at what we call waste and find the best possible beginnings. The oxygen in the atmosphere is the waste of bacteria, and when this atmosphere was first produced 2.9 billion years ago, it wiped out most species because it was toxic to them. So, we should rethink the question, ‘What is waste?’

The concept of gentrification of the gut is super interesting. Beatriz and I are researching the relationship between westernisation, urbanisation, and digestion. We are collaborating with scientists that study the steady decline in the microbiome from hunter-gatherers in the deep Amazon, to those in small towns near the jungle, to larger rural towns, to big cities, to those that move to the west. This radical decrease in micro biodiversity is directly associated with urbanisation and westernisation. Perhaps gentrification could be a key to understanding the rise of antibiotic-resistant microbes. So it returns to Beatriz's point about how architecture always aims towards health but produces new forms of sickness every time. We're interested in unlocking this deadly spiral of decreasing micro-biodiversity and ever-increasing antimicrobial resistance.

BC For over ten thousand years, we have been trying to solve this health question and its implications. For example, the epidemics of polio which affected so many kids, from the early twentieth century to the mid-1950s in America. The bacteria of polio was always everywhere, but people were naturally immunised because they were exposed to the bacteria daily. Then came all the cleaning routines of the early twentieth century, and we produced a new generation of kids who were very vulnerable to polio. It mainly affected little kids because grown-up people already had some immunity. So, meticulously cleaning the architectural environment produced one of the worst pandemics of the twentieth century because it eliminated bacterial exposure, a problem they couldn't anticipate. Now, we are producing another vulnerability with the overuse of antibiotics, antiseptics and so on.

OT Immunisation or vaccination is the most significant architectural outcome resulting from cleanliness and hygiene. Western medicine, before it discovered vaccination, already knew that Indigenous people, slowly exposing themselves to foreign agents, also brought some resistance against them. Epidemics, pandemics and local diseases regulate or modulate interspecies populations.

MW This relates to the concept of what is a pathogen versus what is not. As we said before, what's waste from one perspective is gold from the other, which is also true for pathogens. Martin Blaser, one of the microbiologists we work with, once said that almost every microbe is almost everywhere: the issue is about the cosmopolitics that either allow or disallow one of them to dominate and become a threat to humans — that is, a pathogen. But until then, it probably contributes to healthy gut politics or other ecologies. So it’s a discourse on politics, on organisms living together.

KOOZ This politics is about how modernist architecture fought sickness and how we try to contrast today’s climate crisis. Yesterday was about whiteness; today, it could be about details meant as ecological contracts and more-than-human materials. A similar discourse can be done about typologies. Can you discuss possible material and spatial shifts to tackle the climate paradigm?

UF / ELII The ecological performativity of architecture involves understanding construction details as frameworks where cosmopolitical issues and the rights of recognition of other species are being disputed. That cosmopolitical performative condition of construction is a fundamental aspect in our projects. And not just the construction details; budgets, technical prescriptions, drawings, etcetera from an ecological perspective, could also be considered "natural contracts", if we use the famous expression by Michel Serres. And like any contract, they must be activated, reinterpreted, updated. I guess from Latour's point of view, rather than contracts, they should be understood as ecological battlefields or trenches. In one of the sessions of "Encounters at the Edge" we held at the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Deborah Danowski used another interesting expression we could also take into consideration: "ecological portals", and Marisol de la Cadena uses yet another powerful idea: "cosmopolitical contact zones". For Andrés Jaque, construction details unfold complex entanglements. How do our projects change if we assume that our construction details are "ecological portals", "cosmopolitical contact zones" or complex entanglements? Of course, none of these spaces are neutral. They are always highly contested. But these notions allow us to understand construction as a kind of "cosmopolitical encounters" or "diplomatic interfaces".

OT There are many different places and scales where these encounters can happen, from the microscopic to the macroscopic. However, my take is more about challenging human exceptionalism. Because on specific scales, there are conflicts of interest. Humans are on a spectrum where their desires conflict with those of other species: they don’t give up their humanness or prioritise other species’ interests. I try to do it when I grow materials — but bringing humans into the conversation without prioritising them is complicated. That's where the conflict explodes because, in human practices, we don't give up our interests to serve other species. For example, the word ‘contract’ — referring to a document written and signed only by humans — expresses an anthropocentric perspective because there's nobody on the other side who counter signs it.

UF / ELII Let us point out that when we say ‘ecological contract’, we don’t refer to details that have an ecological sensibility, but to absolutely every construction detail. Even the least sustainable detail can be read as an "ecological contract", to the extent that it has an ecological impact. But, yes, we agree: Serres' contract is too anthropocentric (and logocentric). We prefer "ecological portal" or "cosmopolitical arenas" instead.

KOOZ It is crucial how we theoretically address and understand these materials, but how will they look?

MW The word 'material' presupposes an anthropocentric point of view, because it refers to what humans use; it's a concept positioned in a specific economy. To articulate this new cosmopolitical complexity, we should involve unrecognisable elements that don't look like materials, dissolving the word 'material' itself. We can start by demystifying materials: one way to do that is by demonstrating that almost all of the construction materials of buildings are the product of bacteria or fossil fuels, which either come from bacteria, maintained by bacteria, or host bacteria. For example, white surfaces — the emblem of the antibacterial approach — host complex and dynamic communities: just pour water on any white surface and wait a few days to see the complexity of life. To undermine an antibacterial philosophy, we should observe the most ordinary buildings and spaces through a microscope.

Architecture makes its antibacterial statements through and with bacteria, which is a paradox. Yet the antibacterial statements have an effect. Contemporary architecture is dry and smooth, and therefore hostile to most bacteria. To change this paradigm, the future architectural materials should be moist and porous to offer hospitality to bacteria. If you're living in moist and porous spaces, you're likely to live longer. It would be the beginning of a conversation about what hospitality might be. In a Latourian sense, such architecture allows for a return to Earth as opposed to the last 10,000 years' attempt to separate humans from the Earth. We need to land again. Reflecting on what kind of architecture would allow us to land on Earth — such a perspective would erase the language of material because material always presupposes a set of molecules without agency waiting to be colonised or shaped by human intelligence.

KOOZ This issue of porosity is fundamental; enlarging the scale shifts the conversation from materials to spatial organisations, which means how possible typologies allow different forms of cohabitation within architecture and with the environment.

BC Yet typologies are also anthropocentric; they are a human category. In general terms, we should discuss changing how we think about the relationship between inside and outside, opposing the hermetic closure of architecture in favour of more porous buildings that are more open to the environment. There are many precedents in the history of architecture; look at the work of Lina Bo Bardi, who accounted for every insect living on the site of her Casa de Vidro in São Paulo before building it. She documents all the plants, trees, animals, insects, and all the species her projects will cohabit with, which the architect doesn’t want to destroy. They are treated as the real clients. It is a kind of hospitality that marks a step forward within a sensibility of care.

UF / ELII Typology has often been understood in universal terms, as universal solutions. But from an ecological approach, those types you mention that allow different forms of cohabitation and relationship with the environment should be considered in a specific and situated way, not in a universal or universally replicable way. Perhaps it is a matter of multiplying rather than unifying the world. What does typology mean in a world of many worlds, as opposed to a ‘one-world’ world?

Bios

Beatriz Colomina is an internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on questions of architecture, art, technology, sexuality, and media. She is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of Architecture and the Founding Director of the interdisciplinary Media and Modernity Program at Princeton University. Her books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994), Domesticity at War (2007), Clip/Stamp/Fold (2010), Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (2016), X-Ray Architecture (2019), and Radical Pedagogies (2022). Her exhibitions include Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006), Playboy Architecture (2012), Radical Pedagogies (2014) and Sick Architecture (2022). In 2016 she was co-curator of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial. She is Doctor Honoris Causa by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In 2020 she was awarded the Ada Louise Huxtable Prize for her contributions to the field of architecture.

elii is an architecture office founded in Madrid in 2006 by Uriel Fogué, Eva Gil and Carlos Palacios. Their professional practice also includes the fields of teaching (Columbia University in the City of New York (GSAPP), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL; Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) and research (Political Fictions Crisis Cabinet). Elii was part of the Spanish Pavilion during the 18th (2023) and the 15th Venice Biennial of Architecture (2016, awarded with the Golden Lion). Two of their works have been selected for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture - the Mies Van der Rohe Award (2015, 2019). They won the Golden Prize Holcim Awards 2023 (together with Husos and Ultrazul, sponsored by the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation). They are the authors of the book: Super Petites Maisons (EPFL, 2022), What is Home Without a Mother (HIAP – Matadero Madrid, 2015), which won an award at the 13th BIAU (2015) and Las arquitecturas del fin del mundo (UF - Puente editores, 2022), awarded at the XVI BEAU (2023) and BIAU (2024). They were the co-editors of UHF.

Orkan Telhan investigates critical issues in cultural, environmental, and social responsibility. He leads the Data Systems and Intelligence group at Ecovative, a biomaterials company specialized in mycelium-based food and textiles. Telhan is also a fellow at MIT’s Art, Culture, and Technology program and serves as president of the Biodesign Challenge. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of Fine Arts in Emerging Design Practices at the University of Pennsylvania. His individual and collaborative works have been exhibited internationally, including the Istanbul Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the New Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Design Museum in London, and Museo Reina Sofia.

Mark Wigley is Professor of Architecture and Dean Emeritus at Columbia University. He is a historian, theorist, and critic who explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. His recent books include: Konrad Wachsmann’s Television: Post-Architectural Transmissions; Passing Through Architecture: The 10 Years of Gordon Matta-Clark; Cutting Matta-Clark: The Anarchitecture Investigation; Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (with Beatriz Colomina); and Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio. He has curated exhibitions at MoMA, The Drawing Center, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Het Nieuwe Instituut, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the Power Station of Art in Shanghai.

Valerio Franzone is Managing Editor at KoozArch. He is a Ph.D. architect (IUAV Venezia) and the director of the architectural design and research studio OCHAP | Office for Cohabitation Processes. OCHAP focuses on the built environment and the relationships between natural and artificial systems, investigating architecture’s role, limits, and potential to explore possible cohabitation typologies and strategies at multiple scales. He has been a founding partner of 2A+P and 2A+P Architettura. His projects have been awarded in international competitions and shown in several exhibitions, such as the International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. His projects and texts appear in magazines like Domus, Abitare, Volume, and AD Architectural Design.