In the talk, Lydia Kallipoliti* - #architect #educator #researcher #thinker - presents her newly published book Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia, followed by a Q&A where we talk about the intentions of writing the book, about how the “waste speaks of the incomplete perception of the World”, the psychological profile of ecological designers and thinkers, the idea that architecture produces nature and other futures.
Kallipoliti divides Histories into three main periods: Naturalism (1866 when Ernst Haeckel coins Ecology), Synthetic Naturalism (c. 1966 with the view of the Whole Earth) and Dark Naturalism (2000-, unravelling of the Anthropocene), each having six chapters where she presents series of narratives which form a matrix of threads that can be accessed in a non-linear way, producing wayfinding of environmental world views. Besides presenting parallel histories, Kallipoliti’s objection to writing the book is decolonizing the notions of environmentalism where she does not lean on indigenous histories rather she offers “reassesing the values that are entrenched in the various perceptions of ecological design as an ideological instrument and a didactic structure”.
*Lydia Kallipoliti is an award-winning architect, engineer, scholar, curator and an Associate Professor at the Cooper Union in New York.
Her work circulates about themes of closing or looping and back-feeding the systems and opening them up. Closing the systems refers to metabolic and cyclical resource processing and reorganisation, the much-needed “self-encapsulation” in the Anthropocene, yet addresses the absurdity of confinement to the specific boundary of home, or office in parallel. Opening those allows (or would allow) them to germinate, eat and converge excrement, becoming living machines. Lydia Kallipoliti is also the principal of the ANAcycle, a design and writing think tank. Her practice includes prototype exhibitions, hybrid and hologram installations, and writings on ecological design, theory and politics, among other related mediums through which she can transverse with spear-headed visions.
Besides exhibiting at Venice Biennal, the Istanbul Biennial, the Oslo Architectural Triennale, she received numerous recognitions and awards. Her book The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What Is the Power of Shit?, was published in 2018 with Lars Müller Publishers. The book we present here, Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia, was published this year (2024) with Actar Publishers.
00:05 Introduction
02:40 Book Presentation
22:58 Q&A: The reasons that lie behind writing this book.
29:11 Q&A: Where do ecology and design converge, and how is architecture instrumentalised in this process?
34:05 Q&A: Reciprocity between architecture, ecology and nature?
37:34 Q&A: The book is titled "Histories", what is the future?
39:54 Q&A: Is there a psychological profile to ecological designers and thinkers?
44:25 Q&A: The role of landscape architecture in ecological design.