_the City As Biological Computer

About

_An exhibition of work by ecoLogicStudio, the Synthetic Landscape Lab at Innsbruck University and the Urban Morphogenesis Lab at The Bartlett UCL curated by Futurecity for the Gallery at Foyles.

In 2018, for The Climate Innovation Summit, architects ecoLogicStudio coated the windowed façade of the Printworks Building in Dublin with bioplastic curtains called Photo.Synth.Etica. Radiant green and coral algae slithered upward through transparent vertical drapes. Powered by the sun, the membranes fed on CO2, pollution and heat from the surrounding atmosphere, cultivating biomass and oxygen for human benefit in the process.

The City as Biological Computer brings these curtains to The Gallery at Foyles, as well as five other visionary projects and proposals by ecoLogicStudio and their academic partners in which architecture, technology and nature are parallel and complementary systems. Urban networks are designed by biological intelligence. Built facades are living microbiomes. Pavilions are self-sustaining urban farms. Sculptures are hosts to pollution-filtering biogel.

At a time of looming environmental crisis, these bio-digital interventions offer integrated, climate-sensitive, design-driven solutions for dense metropolises with often limited spatial opportunities for new trees or traditional plant life. ecoLogicStudio proposes a city, and a world, made reactive and luminescent by a cloud of distributed bio-pixels.