Designing the Urban Microbiome

It is timely in the Anthropocene, and even more so in the age of a global pandemic, to search for a non-anthropocentric mode of reasoning, and consequently also of designing. The Photosynthetica Consortium, established in 2018 and including London-based design innovation practice ecoLogicStudio, the Urban Morphogenesis Lab (Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL)) and the Synthetic Landscape Lab (University of Innsbruck, Austria), has therefore been pursuing architecture as a research-based practice. This Consortium has been exploring the interdependence of human and biological intelligence in design, by working directly with non-human living organisms.