SYm[bio]scape

Studio Theodore Spyropoulos

Tutors Mostafa El-Sayed, Apostolos Despotidis, Aleksandar Bursac

Team Xiaomeng Zhang, Jiadong Liang, Lekai Zhang, Xirong Zheng

Sym[BIO]scape is a bio-based design research project that aims to terraform the Earth based symbiotic and agent-based growth strategies. In the era of post-Anthropocene where technology and artificial intelligence compute, condition and construct our world, non-human architecture and unmanned factories are constantly occupying the rural areas and countryside. These machine landscapes emerge together with land degradation and the loss of vernacularity and architectural context. The project Sym[BIO]scape puts forward a manifesto towards the evolution of landscape infrastructure not only for land restoration and sustainable material production, but one that establishes a symbiotic system with the environment through energy harvesting and transformation, along with landscape reshaping and terraforming.

 This hybrid system combines two biological behaviours in its operating logic: the anthill strategy for the generation of porous scaffold structures and the mycelium strategy to support natural growth and soil sustainability. Both digital simulations and physical experiments are conducted to research the behaviour of ant colonies and the growth of mycelia. In addition, this is a self-assembling and self-renewable system, adaptive to the dynamic environment. Starting from the re-distribution of the on-site material based on the behavioural pathways of ants, real-time data sensing and harvesting-through-machine learning strategy, it generates the porous scaffold structure as a host environment for mycelium growth.

 Swarm intelligence, generated through pheromone-based stigmergy within machine-to-machine communication to detect and analyse the on-site material, enables decision-making and self-assembly to form the structure that constantly reacts to the dynamic environment and terraforming the landscape. Then, with the restoring ability of mycelium, the system possesses the capability for land restoration and material sustainability. Following the methodology of energy conservation, those attributes, which are embedded in both the unit and swarm behaviour, formulate a new kind of urban infrastructure that could evolve over time, ultimately constructing a self-circulating ecosystem that could be symbiotic with the Earth.

 The project Sym[BIO]scape creates a machine landscape that is no longer human-centric, questioning the definition of architecture for hundreds of years: architecture is no longer a living space, but becomes an extension of human life as a data center and a new typology of ecological infrastructure.