Digestion - e-flux

Editors Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Lydia Kallipoliti, Areti Markopoulou

Contributors Mark Wigley, Lindsey Wikstrom, Mae-ling Lokko, Rachel Armstrong, Rolf Hughes, Meredith TenHoor, Aude-Line Dulière, Juliet Haysom, James Westcott, Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich, and more…

The waste products of a human body’s digestive system are connected to numerous treatment systems that allow it to be reincorporated into a wider ecological system; to continue circulating. The waste products of buildings, however, rarely do. In exceptional cases, the landfills to which most former buildings are destined become new land. But thinking what it would mean to build system capable of treating the food and the waste of a city itself—its building—would entail nothing short of radically rethinking what it means to build a city as such.

Digestion is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale, supported by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), the Estonian Museum of Architecture, and Friendship Products.

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10 essays

The Nursery

Reif Larsen

It must be said from the outset that Lila disagreed with the whole idea of Geffen’s father coming to live with them.

Shifting Porosities

Feifei Zhou, Zahirah Suhaimi, and Jefree Salim

The interface between land and water is nature’s metabolic process. In this messy, everchanging, and unpredictable zone, different kinds of porosities emerge and become the birthplace of many more-than-human livelihoods. Water channels are nature’s blood vessel network.

The Skillful Cook

Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich

What does it mean to be a skillful cook? Over the last several centuries, the skillful cook was arguably the one who most successfully healed the historical wounds of modernity by reconciling traditional dishes with modern techniques.

Placeholders

Aude-Line Dulière, Juliet Haysom, and James Westcott

The term “circularity” implies a kind of supreme intentionality, where the lifecycle of a material has been pre-ordained by wise planners, long in advance of its “birth,” in a series of cute diagrams.

Envisioning Future Food Systems

Meredith TenHoor

The challenges of repairing broken food systems in this time of dire climate crisis necessitates cross-scalar strategies.

I, Holobiont

Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes

Embryologically-speaking, your living home is grown from a primitive architectural streak which is cultured by hand in our studio using the stem cells that you provide.

Hot Air Rising

Mae-ling Lokko

Hot, moist air has long been a powerful, yet largely invisible, working fluid in the colonial and modern enterprise. Processes of air conditioning represent acts of metabolism, ensuring the adaptation of air to the project of human domestication.

A Gold Mine, Above Ground

Lindsey Wikstrom

Urban mining is the process of recovering materials that are lodged inside an already standing anthropic mass. Seeing material forms as resources rather than landfill waste can prevent mineral matter from being inefficiently re-buried.

The Excremental Interior

Mark Wigley

Digestion turns the outside into an inside. Our organism is never simply in the world but an intricate folding of outside into an inside. More precisely still, it is a fold that produces the very sense of an outside by constructing an interior seemingly detached from it.

Editorial

Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Lydia Kallipoliti, and Areti Markopoulou

Digestion is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale, curated by Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou, featuring contributions by Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes; Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich; Aude-Line Duliere, Juliet Haysom, and James Westcott; Reif Larsen; Mae-ling Lokko; Meredith TenHoor; Mark Wigley; Lindsey Wikstrom; and Feifei Zhou, Zahirah Suhaimi, and Jefree Salim.

Subject

Architecture, Agriculture, Sustainability, Food & Cooking, Environment, Infrastructure

Contributors

Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Lydia Kallipoliti, and Areti Markopoulou Editorial
Mark Wigley The Excremental Interior
Lindsey Wikstrom A Gold Mine, Above Ground
Mae-ling Lokko Hot Air Rising
Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes I, Holobiont
Meredith TenHoor Envisioning Future Food Systems
Aude-Line Dulière, Juliet Haysom, and James Westcott Placeholders
Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich The Skillful Cook
Feifei Zhou, Zahirah Suhaimi, and Jefree Salim Shifting Porosities
Reif Larsen The Nursery

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Subject