Funded Projects
This note is about topical funded projects:
Bio-based architecture for sustainable living, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen et al.
This interdisciplinary project asks how we can rethink sustainable building practices through a bio-based material paradigm in response to the increasing global crisis of material depletion. Despite well-organised calls for action maturing into legislation and an attentive profession, architecture is proving reticent in this transition. Bio-based materials are fundamentally different to current building materials being characterised by their complex heterogeneity, unpredictable behaviours and limited lifespans. This project identifies that the key impediments to this transition lie with architecture’s inability to represent, conceptualise and operationalise bio-based materials. It argues that to design with bio-based materials we must challenge the fundamental value proposition of architecture and expand our conception of material lifespan to find new practices of construction. It proposes a holistic eco-metabolistic framework, that allows for carbon-neutral, renewable and materially optimised design solutions. It employs a research-by-design method to investigate three bio-based material perspectives (glulam, bio-polymer composites and bioluminescent bacteria) and instrumentalises them through three advanced computational modelling networks for the predictive modelling, adaptive fabrication and environmental sensing of bio-based materials. It challenges our preconception of design agency as restricted to the traditional cut-off point of building completion, proposing new participatory practices of continual construction to recast the short lifespans of bio-based materials as effective properties of a new sustainable practice. By enabling us to think of buildings as co-present and actively engaged through processes of maintenance and intervention, the project responds to the search for sustainable, more socially conscious and more democratic models of production.
Project description
Revolutionising eco-living in the urban space
The human-nature dichotomy imposed by the contemporary intense urbanisation is a crucial factor for decreasing liveability and human well-being in the cities. Aiming to drastically enhance the human-nature interaction in the urban environment, the EU-funded ECOLOPES project will introduce a radically new integrated ecosystem approach to architecture, equally focused on humans, plants, animals and associated organisms. The project will focus on providing the core technologies needed for transforming the building envelope into an ecolope, a multi-species living space for the aforementioned types of inhabitants. ECOLOPES aspires to contribute to the development of an information model ontology and a computational modelling and simulation infrastructure that will revolutionise future design.
Objective
Urbanisation constitutes a major environmental issue of the 21st century. Within cities, densification, the decrease of green open spaces, and a continued reliance on grey infrastructures result in increasing separation of people from nature and decrease access to ecosystem services. This decreases the liveability of cities and reduces human well-being. Current approaches fall short in providing breakthrough solutions, because they perpetuate the human-nature dichotomy due to anthropocentric design. We propose a radical change for city development: instead of minimizing the negative impact of urbanisation on nature, we aim at urbanisation to be planned and designed such that nature – including humans - can co-evolve within the city. This vision requires a radically new integrated ecosystem approach to architecture that focuses equally on humans, plants, animals, and associated organisms such as microbiota. In ECOLOPES, we propose to develop the technology that will allow to achieve this vision. We will focus on the envelope, the building enclosure. In ECOLOPES, we transform the envelope into an ecolope, a multi-species living space for four types of inhabitants, humans, plants, animals, and microbiota. ECOLOPES will develop the core technologies for designing ecolopes in a systematic way, considering the needs of all habitants. ECOLOPES will make biological knowledge available for the architectural design process, to find architectural solutions that enable synergies and limit conflicts between the inhabitants. The ecolopes designed by this multi-species approach will restore the beneficial human - nature relationships in cities. Key products of ECOLOPES are: (1) ECOLOPES Information Model Ontology that integrates ecological and architectural knowledge, data and models into a data-integrated design recommendation system; (2) ECOLOPES Computational modelling and simulation environment, that is based on the EIM Ontology, to make knowledge available for design.