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The idea for the project emerged from the urgent need to address environmental degradation caused by overcrowded urban centers, traffic congestion, and extreme population density. Recognizing the necessity of reintegrating natural habitats into urban environments, we envisioned a concept where cities themselves could become solutions to these fundamental problems. The concept was developed by exploring the potential of living buildings interconnected with urban devices, creating a symbiotic relationship between human and non-human species. This approach replaces adverse interactions with harmonious ones, making ecological processes visible and accessible through closed-loop systems, ultimately promoting human well-being within urban ecologies.
The project establishes a dynamic relationship with the surrounding landscape and urban area by integrating natural processes and promoting interactions between human bodies and social practices. By enhancing photosynthesis and cellular respiration, the project transforms matter into biomass, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Incorporating natural ecosystem concepts, the project reflects and adapts to its urban surroundings. Performative capsules serve as habitats for living systems, using translucent materials for light penetration and porous skins for gas exchange. This constructed organism connects seamlessly with the environment, promoting sustainable integration of microorganisms and human life, and enhancing interdependence between the project and the urban landscape.
Entangles Matter places a strong emphasis on sustainability and eco-compatibility through various strategies. The project is nature-based and incorporates concepts from natural ecosystems to create a self-sustaining physical environment. All components are designed for easy and quick assembly, allowing for flexible configurations. This adaptability supports constant repositioning within dynamic urban environments. The project harnesses the benefits of natural cycles through synthetic systems, using biological batteries to recreate scalable ecosystems. This approach fosters novel interactions between nature and humans via bio-design applications and biological activators, integrating living systems into daily life and promoting self-sustaining scenarios.
To symbiotically and productively merge natural cycles with human habitats, Entangled Matter is a modular system for dynamic matter conversion. The project incorporates concepts from natural ecosystems to remediate climate change-induced stresses through new self-sufficient ecologies, as it tests response capacities and enhances the efficiency of publicly accessible devices. Aware that open systems promote adaptation, Entangled Matter is a combinatorial network of scalable entanglements, where hygroscopic materials are combined with organic life forms that sequester carbon to filter the air around us and cool our immediate surroundings in order to re-establish healthy microclimatic conditions.
Entanglement here starts from a condition of codependency: modular clusters, primarily configured out of five differently programmed 3d-printed ‘capsules’ with specific performative and structural functions, can be aggregated into an infinite matrix to harvest energy and filter air - an act of remediation while creating new self-sufficient ecologies and microclimates . The performative capsules establish the habitat for the living systems inside, featuring translucent materials that enable the light to enter, and equipped with a perforated, porous skin to exchange gas. This constructed organism becomes a system that connects to the surrounding environment, enabling a sustainable integration of microorganisms and human life.
Within Entangled Matter, all parts can easily and quickly be manufactured and assembled, enabling different aggregations of performative and structural elements to generate different scales of intervention. The project incorporates advanced technologies for people to experience, with a clear view of the entanglements generated within its parts. It raises awareness of the possibility of extracting the benefits of natural cycles from synthetic systems, as it recreates scalable ecosystems.
X-Topia together with CRGarchitecture (Marcella Del Signore, Cordula Roser Gray, Tatiana Teixeira) is a multidisciplinary design team based in New York, New Orleans, and Rio de Janeiro. The award-winning design-research practice explores the intersection of architecture and urbanism with technology and the public, social and cultural realm. The research focuses on interscalar design approaches that engage the notion of socio-technical systems through computation, prototyping, material and fabricated assemblies, data-driven protocols, and adaptive environments. The team has been engaged in a wide array of urban interventions and small-scale prototypes recognized internationally through publications, grants, and awards.
