Proto/e/co/logics: speculative materialism in architecture, a summer symposium curated by Croatian architects Alisa Andrasek and Bruno Juricic, and staged in the beautiful setting of the Rovinj archipelago on the Istrian coast, aimed to ‘tease out speculative directions for architecture beyond innocent and reductive approaches to ecology.’ The focus for Andrasek, co-founder of biothing in London, and Juricic, was on architects finding an agency within nature, ‘a condition that is already artificial’, embracing the complexity of society.

Recent tendencies have indeed taken a unique set of positions, driven by mathematical and computational abstractions, as the duo observe, transforming the ways in which architects consider the ‘matter-information relationship’. Now that matter itself is perceived as an active agent, and greenwashing is so common, what kind of architectural speculation strategies in relation to ‘denaturalised material ecology’—bearing in mind nature’s modes of behaviour from generative beauty to utter disequilibrium—are desirable?

http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/protoecologics-/