77. AITC: Nature, The Posthuman, and The Microbiome with Ilaria Mazzoleni

Original Drawing by Tori Haynes

“We want to control everything. [we think] our coexistence works if its by our rules...but being in nature we begin to understand our limitations and we stop thinking of ourselves as singular entities, but as composed of many different things.”

-Ilaria Mazzoleni

This week we continue our ongoing miniseries Architecture in the Time of Coronavirus with architect, biomimicist and educator Ilaria Mazzoleni. In this chat we see that the “eco-laboratory” is an apt metaphor to describe the body, architecture, and manifestations of “living” at various scales.

Timestamp Outline 

2:45    Ilaria Mezzolini’s introduction and affiliations

3:00    NAHR - a residency program and eco-laboratory “formed to encourage exploration of the rural-urban co-dependency”

5:52    a regenerative economy recognizes that the earth is the original capital asset and it  places true value on the environment, which functions as the irreplaceable human/life support system. 

6:55    “The bottom line question is always: what is nature? What is the relationship between architecture and nature?”    IM

8:09    “[The micro-scale of materiality] was the beginning of my interest in sustainability [...] and then to build to an architecture that is sustainable and then bio-inspired design, or, how can we learn from nature?”    IM

8:56    Posthumanist Theory “claims to offer a new epistemology that is not anthropocentric and therefore not centered in Cartesian dualism. It seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological.” (J. Bolter, 1)

10:47    “The body is the element of us that tells us that we are nature, we are part of ecological systems.”    IM

11:30    Discussion of how COVID is transforming our perspectives of the indoor/outdoor binary. 

16:20    Discussion of biophilia and biophobia

17:50    “We want to control everything. [we think] our coexistence works if its by our rules...but being in nature we begin to understand our limitations and we stop thinking of ourselves as singular entities, but as composed of many different things.”    IM

20:48    Microbiome home project

28:40    Architecture Follows Nature

30:22    Ilaria articulates that there is a distinction between biomimetics, biomimicry, biomorphism, bio-inspiration 

32:00    Vikram asks if there are examples of how we have always lived in a biomimetic nature?

36:00    A discussion of slowness

47:50    A discussion of how Ilaria became interested in the natural and ecological side of design