Abstract:
We live in a time, filled with killer germs caused by the very doing of our existence in the world. We live in a place, exposed to an expanding list of pathogens that are rapidly spreading through our cities. We live as humans, who are prey to these emerging infectious diseases. Humanity has only had a real comprehension of what makes us sick for a little over a hundred years. Despite our knowledge, the virulence of pathogen populations continues to emerge and spread initiating epidemics and deaths at a global scale. The intent of the project is an attempt to constitute a response to emerging diseases within our urban environment which make up the dynamics of life and biological processes. The outcome is Adaptive Biotopes, undertaken in the design part of this thesis. It serves to create a new urban ecology that can adapt and sustain nature together with mankind through a symbiosis. Adaptive Biotopes proposes to activate a new outcome in the urban environment that is responsive, mechanical, and utilitarian. The project reacts to current social and natural exigencies of ecological design; attempting, through the assemblage of technical and material systems, to generate the complexity of an artificial ecosystem within the urban environment. The world is no longer composed simply of individual species, but must be thought of in terms of ecologies composed of a complex association of organisms integrated in symbiotic systems.
