Curated by Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou, the 2022 edition of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale titled "Edible; Or, the Architecture of Metabolism" aims at engaging "architects, planners, and environmental designers to develop a proactive stance on architecture’s expressive capacity to perform circular operations, to produce resources -generate food and energy- as well as to decompose itself" to reimagine the logic behind circular economies.

On the occasion of the official opening in Tallinn, we discussed with chief curator Areti Markopoulou about the Future Food Deal call for proposals and the urge to reimagine planetary food systems.

KOOZ In your call for a Future Food Deal you discuss the urge to reimagine planetary food systems, at the same time you refer to architecture’s capacity to generate but also consume resources. How can architects balance these processes of creation and consumption?

AM One fundamental mistake of the mainstream idea of sustainability (or at least the way society perceives it) is the aspect that we need to compromise our needs and desires. We are asked to consume less, to build less, to generate less emissions, to move less, and so on and so forth. At the same time the global systems in place operate in a totally different mindset; look at the pandemic, for instance, and the food (or other resources) uncertainty it raised. Additional to the pandemic, the blockage of Suez Canal in March 2021 that ceased global transportation of goods and created a major impact on the international economy is another example of the debility of current systems and the urgency for a united reflection on the fragility of our production and distribution processes, the significance of the geolocation and mediums of such processes, and finally, our accountability for how we occupy our planet.

We believe we need to ask more from architecture, to ask more from how our by-products are reused, from how (and where) our resources are generated in buildings and cities and, eventually, to implement new forms of localization and a new paradigm that operates with an abundance mindset - rather than from a place of "scarcity”.

KOOZ What are the core relationships or connections you draw between architecture and food at the individual - even bodily - collective and planetary scales?

AM What is interesting when we explore the material, societal, or geopolitical entanglements between architecture and food is the realisation that these connections operate on different scales. From the micro scale of the cells of our body, to the macro scale of the territorial ecologies. It is not, though, just the multiscalar capacity of these connections that interest us. In EDIBLE we are additionally dealing with the interdependencies among food, architecture, humans, as well as biological, cultural and technological others; we are therefore discussing a multiscalar and multi-species approach in the connections of architecture and food.

The Robotic Urban Farmers, for instance, is an installation from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC & MRAC), that explores the transformation of building skins into vertical urban orchards and the symbiosis among living systems, humans, and robots.

Mitchell Joachim and Vivial Kuan use puffed rice to produce building tile components that serve as food urgency stock while at the same time vastly increasing biodiversity by offering food to insects, birds, and other small mammals. Finally, Topotheque Design Research Studio, present “ Yfaloid” which are 3d printed artificial reefs that could populate the deep oceans, increase marine life biodiversity, prevent illegal fishing and enhance local economies. In addition, the artificial reefs can be considered as substrates that create habitat and food for fish (algae) that then becomes food for people.

These novel approaches to design, construction and management of the built environment emerge from the inter-connections among architecture and food. And they bring together the farm, the city, inter-species alliances, environmental inequality, and the stomach.

KOOZ Food plays an important role across cultures around the globe, so could food become a transcultural element of connection or reflection, a basis for virtuous decolonial, critical and equitable design practices?

AM Food organises and establishes territorial sovereignty and political struggle, which are largely hidden behind power regimes that maintain aesthetic and lifestyle desires while changing the earth. The appearance of edibles, as well as the ways in which they are ingested and then wasted, are entangled with political protocols that manufacture and empower desires. These very political protocols also define the modes of reproduction and prefigure the modes of discourse through which food is envisioned, sourced, and distributed. In this lens, we use food as the tool for imagining scenarios for alternative futures. We use food as a tool to map and redraw the affinities of the built environment as a product of many forces, translated in the tensions between products and by-products, production and consumption and, finally, creation and decomposition.

KOOZ Why and how does the metaphor of metabolism (and its loaded meaning in architecture) help redefining novel, sustainable, circular and ethical architectural solutions?

AM Today, within the context of interconnected global crises, the idea of a world where resources are recirculated is not just a great idea but a necessity for planetary habitability. Recirculating resources, though, require fundamental paradigm shifts in the way we perceive, design, manage and construct our built environment. Nature, for instance, does not recognize the concept of “waste” in its operation, rather it uses by-products as new resources for other natural systems to operate. Could this apply to architecture? Eliminating the concept of “waste” in our current buildings and cities requires redefining what “resource” means and the places where it could be found or from where it could be “mined”. It also requires redefining not only the origins, but also the destination of our built products. In the curatorial exhibition we showcase examples of buildings made from up-cycled waste, buildings that produce food locally, building parts that process by-products to produce energy, or even biodegradable synthetic landscapes that enhance biodiversity to increase resources, such as food, and meet societal needs.

KOOZ During the opening of TAB and the curatorial exhibition EDIBLE the Estonian President said that “we are at an ecological turning point” and “the solution [to ecological problems] is in our hands”. I was wondering whether he was referring to individual agency or if you believe he was referring to politics. The exhibition touches upon the geopolitical dimension but also at the small individual scale (that of architects too). So do you think that politics at a national, and even a global scale – think of global organisations - are ready to tackle all the issues that you raised in EDIBLE and, overall, at TAB 2022?

AM I think the President was referring to both himself as a representative, a decision maker and decision making processes, but also to ourselves. We have said it also during the press visit at the opening that we do agree that we are living at a critical turning point. There is, however, a collective intelligence, collective responsibility that is emerging. We must realise that there is a collective responsibility to be shared among us citizens, users; we should not wait for decision makers and their solutions. Vice versa, we need to change our lifestyles, policies need to be implemented such as some of the different solutions that we are showcasing in the exhibition; many of them are feasible and can be actually implemented. It is not easy, but we need to have a plan. For instance, it is absolutely insane that in many countries, both in Europe and around the world, there is a limit of square metres of photovoltaic panels that people can add to their property. Why would that happen? I mean, it is a simple example, but it showcases the fact that there are policies that need to be implemented. Policies that include different stakeholders, beneficiaries, have to change and the main driver should be the way the idea of benefit is perceived. And of course, on the other hand, we do need to change our individual lifestyles as well. The project of the Spin Unit showcased in our exhibition is very interesting, because the authors started with the idea of providing urban self-sufficiency in terms of food. We realised, however, that this was not possible, we will not be able to produce what society and the population need unless we all change dietary habits. I think that this is an interesting aspect that we need to keep into consideration.

KOOZ Cookbooks and manuals play an important role in the exhibition. In the past they played multiple roles: cultural, economic, biopolitical and so on. What is their role today?

AM Cookbooks, manuals, food guidelines have the potential to create culture. In the Geopolitics section of the exhibition we focused on how food is a very important resource around which different kinds of communities organise themselves; from where they live in relation to the resources of the land and the possibilities to grow food. In terms of eating habits, nutrients - such as the soy in the edible brick we showcased - we can see how different cultures respond to that connection with food and nutrients’ distribution. But I think that today it is slightly different; guidelines and manuals today are very important in terms of metabolism. If you take a human body, different human bodies, you are able to extract a system of the metabolic processes: think of the liver, breathing, digestion, etcetera. But when we speak about the built environment and cities, then we are lacking a common framework, or a common language of what is metabolism. This could be seen as negative, in the sense that we do not have a systemic approach towards our built environment in relation to how different processes work. So that could be eventually solved by guidelines or by manuals. Hence this lack would also be seen as positive in the sense that it provides space for reflection and action, even localised because each place and context have its own peculiarity, its own local processes, local identities. Differences should be valued as smart cities, for instance, provided guidelines, technological solutions, cookbooks that could be exported into other cities. It was definitely a disaster because, for example, you cannot impose a guideline, a design solution that emerged from reflections on Barcelona to the city of Mumbai.

Bio

Areti Markopoulou is a Greek architect, researcher and urban technologist working at the intersection between architecture and digital technologies. She is the Academic Director at IAAC in Barcelona, where she also leads the Advanced Architecture Group, a multidisciplinary research group exploring how design and science can positively impact and transform the present and future of our built spaces, the way we live and interact. Her research and practice focus on redefining the architecture of cities through an ecological and technological spectrum combining design with biotechnologies, new materials, digital fabrication and big data. Areti is co-founder of the art/tech gallery StudioP52 and co-editor of Urban Next, a global network focused on rethinking architecture through the contemporary urban milieu.

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.