Podcast S3E1: Bridging the gap between living and architecture: metabolic buildings, technological species, and a culture of care

Can the buildings that we live in come alive? Could such living buildings help us to create a healthier, more sustainable future? Could they become adaptive, resilient structures that care for the planet while empathizing, comforting and inspiring us? The Living Dialogs series brings together scholars and thinkers to collectively reflect on living architecture and its implications for our changing world.

We believe that knowledge creation, like living architecture itself, is a collaborative and living endeavour – that meaning is not simply created through the exchange of information but that ideas are formed through open and emergent conversations.

Podcast S3E1: Bridging the gap between living and architecture: metabolic buildings, technological species, and a culture of care

With Manuel Kretzer and Areti Markopoulou

57:46 — https://livingarchitecturesystems.com/podcast/s3e1

October 23, 2023

In this episode, Professor Dr. Manuel Kretzer and Architect and Urban Technologist, Areti Markopoulou join Living Dialogs host Edgar Cardenas in a thought-provoking conversation about buildings as organisms, reconceptualizing resource scarcity, and architecture’s impact on people and the environment. The dialog implicitly reflects a strong return to Indigenous and communal ways of understanding our relationship to Nature and the species around us, and asks us to think about what that might mean as we expand the definition of the word species and our ideas of life itself.

Guests

- Prof. Dr. Manuel Kretzer,
- Director, Materiability Research Group
- Anhalt University of Applied Sciences
- https://www.materiability.com
- Dr. Areti Markopoulou,
- Architect and Urban Technologist. Academic Director
- Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia
- https://www.iaac.net

Supported by the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, Michigan State University Center for Interdisciplinarity and the University of Waterloo.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Podcast References

In the podcast you will have heard the following references; follow the links to find out more.

02:59 – Responsive architecture

03:30 – Ecological architecture

16:45 – Archigram, 1960s UK conceptual architecture group

16:47 – Coop Himmelblau

17:58 – Richard Brautigan, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace poem and analysis (and for a modern take, the BBC Series of the same name)

22:45 – Barcelona’s green roof initiative

25:04 – Rosi Braidotti, post-anthropomorphism/post-humanism

25:05 – Anna Tsing

26:10 – Think Different, Apple slogan and advertising campaign

31:29 – Learning Cities: Collective Intelligence in Urban Design

31:29 – Benjamin Bratton, American philosopher

31:50 – Herbert A. Simon (1978 Nobel Prize in Economics), Sciences of the Artificial

41:50 – Cedric Price, “Technology is the answer, but what was the question?”

43:05 – 3D printed living wall project, IAAC

51:20 – Buckminster Fuller, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

53:20 – Fridays for Future

54:23 – Collective Intelligence Design paradigm

54:31 – Responsive Cities symposium 2023, Barcelona

Living Dialogs Team

Rob Gorbet
Executive Producer

Edgar Cardenas
Executive Producer & Podcast Host

Sascha Hastings
Producer & Editor

Olivia Deneka Kopeschny
Project Manager & Marketing Coordinator

Graeme DePiero
Project Manager & Marketing Coordinator

Episode Archive

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