Author: Stefan Castellucci

Venice is suffering from many major issues that include population displacement, escalating living costs, and a dwindling availability of affordable local housing.  This is directly a result of the influx between the permanent residents of Venice and the seasonal tourism, and how this is affecting the struggle “to acquire valuable resources of space and commodities”.  In this example the use of slime mold as a self-sustaining organism is applied to the urban fabric of Venice. Due to this flooding of tourism and the tides, the project utilizes the rooftops to create links between Venice’s isolated communities.  The adaptive lifestyle of slime mold changes based on available resources, and can be applied to the similar in Venice, however the result would hopefully be “fruiting bodies emerge to ensure the reproduction of the next generation.”  From there the project attempts to create a prefabricated system that replicates the membranes of the slime mold, leaving Venice with a easily changing self sustaining system that could possibly pull them out of there current adversity.  I would like to take this concept and explore how it can be utilized in other cities.  Could this be a start to the idea of how the scientific aspects of nature can be incorporated to create a system that still maintains the essence of what architecture is and can do (link people and communities).

— Stefan Castellucci

 

RESEARCH RESOURCES

Gissen, David. A More Monumental, Non-Naturalistic Environment. 51-53

 

Lima, Antonietta Iolanda. Soleri: architecture as human ecology. New York, N.Y.: Monacelli Press, 2003

 

Ruy, David. Randomness and Irreducible Complexity. Tarp Architecture Manual 10, “Coding Parameters”

 

“Biomimicry 3.8.” Biomimicry 3.8. http://biomimicry.net (accessed September 15, 2013).

After doing the reading by David Ruy, Randomness and Irreducible Complexity, and David Gissen’s, A More Monumental, Non-Naturalistic Environment. I wanted to look into how architecture and the idea of environment can start to find a possible solution/happy medium between the scientific aspects and the emotional experiential aspects.  Through the use of Ruy’s suggestion to understand the randomness in natural sequences, and how we can begin to decipher them, how can we harness the essence of how they are formed and function?  However it is important to only allow these natural sequences to inform architecture.  The example that I began to explore is called Slime Mold (Physarum Polycephalum), “which is a biological organism that also has many ambiguities: it categorizes as a protist, it is a single cell organism but it contains multiple nucleuses, it shows complex behaviors despite its simple structure.”  Slime Mold’s natural sequencing can be harnessed to create architecture that can functions not only as biology as a metaphor, but rather a collection of active systems.  Through the derived network logic from Slime Mold, “The nodes created become the place of birth of a new kind of architecture: non-planned, self-growing and self-sustaining, these ‘living organisms’”.

 

 

— Stefan Castellucci

 

RESEARCH RESOURCES

 

Dodington, Edward. How to Design With the Animal:Constructing Post Humanist Environments. Houston : Proquest LLC, 2009.

 

Gissen, David. A More Monumental, Non-Naturalistic Environment. 51-53Ruy, David.

 

Randomness and Irreducible Complexity. Tarp Architecture Manual 10, “Coding Parameters”