Alliances for a Resourceful City
9 → 10 October 2023

Keller Easterling:
Medium Design

Repeatable spatial products and monocultures are mechanisms of inequality and climate change that are rapidly generating a new layer of the earth’s crust. To put between our hands these spaces that seem out of our hands and to give spatial practices another relevance in culture, alternative organs of design can reconsider the very terms of innovation and infrastructure.

More than new technologies, innovations are also protocols of interplay to reverse sprawl, rewire transportation, or generate community infrastructures as worthy of funding as those of concrete and conduit. In interdisciplinary coalitions, design has special capacities to address inequality, climate, migration, transportation, labor, racism, whiteness, land tenure, and reparations. Entangled, physical, lumpy, live, space is heavy information to confront financial abstractions that have done so much automatic harm. Shedding dominant cultural logics, this work joins forces with victims of that harm to galvanize solidarity around practical counter-logics and planetary thinking.

Keller Easterling is an designer, writer and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale.
Her books include, Medium Design (Verso 2021), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999). Easterling is also the co-author (with Richard Prelinger) of Call it Home, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934-1960.Easterling lectures and exhibits internationally. Her research and writing was included in the 2014 and 2018 Venice Biennales. Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist in Architecture and Design.

Camilla van Deurs:
Building for Copenhagen Life

Copenhagen has won the title of UNESCO International Union of Architects (UIA) World Capital of Architecture in 2023. The city designated World Capital of Architecture will become a global forum for discussions on the world’s most pressing challenges through the prisms of culture, heritage, urban planning, and architecture.

Copenhagen carries a strong legacy within architecture, historic buildings and palaces. This legacy has been carried on by innovative, contemporary Danish architects and designers. In 2023, Copenhagen will set off from its all-pervading legacy and continuous booms of innovative buildings and urban spaces with an ever-increasing focus on combining architecture with sustainability and livability. The city aims to become carbon neutral by 2025 and boasts many green initiatives to reach its goal: Green public transport, zero-emission machinery on construction sites, environmentally friendly district heating - just to mention a few of the City’s solutions to ensure clean air and a sustainable urban environment. Cycling is the core to the city’s unmistakable brand, and Copenhagen has several times been voted the world’s best city for cyclists. These green initiatives are a key factor to everyday life in the city towards a better and more sustainable future.

Camilla van Deurs is the Chief City Architect for the City of Copenhagen since February 2019, working to shape a more livable capital in one of the world’s most sustainable cities.
Among other green initiatives she chairs Copenhagen´s involvement in CirCuit, a collaborative EU project across four cities: Copenhagen, Hamburg, the Helsinki region (City of Vantaa) and Greater London who have teamed up with partners from the entire built environment value chain. Camilla also chairs the Advisory Board at The Royal Danish Academy - Architecture. Before joining the City of Copenhagen Camilla was a partner at Gehl Architects, a board member of the Danish Architects Association and an external professor at The University of Copenhagen. Camilla holds a Master of Architecture and a PhD in Urban Design.

Phil Ayres:
Extending technologies of the past towards solutions for the present and visions of the future.

Weaving and fermentation represent two of humanity’s most enduring technologies, but what is their relevance in helping to address contemporary challenges of resource scarcity, social inequality and the need to radically overhaul architectural production?

Is looking to the past for solutions to the present anachronistic; romantic; defeatist? Or do these enduring technologies offer deep reservoirs of innovative potential, enabling a reconsideration of our material base; supporting the invention of novel architectural form grounded in a respect for planetary boundaries; contributing to, rather than degrading, ecosystem services?

Through reference to completed and on-going research projects at the Chair for Biohybrid Architecture, it will be discussed how these ancient technologies can be recoded in a contemporary architectural context to provide the basis for improved environmental responsibility and sustainability – and from a social perspective – promote low barriers to entry, knowledge sharing, community practice and empowerment through mastery of highly accessible and socially scalable craft practices. This will be showcased through works investigating Kagome weaving, mycelium composites and novel Engineered Living Materials (ELMs).

Phil is an architect, researcher and educator. He holds the newly established Chair for Bio-hybrid Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy – the first professorship of its kind within Danish architectural research and education.
The research focus at the chair is the design and production of novel bio-hybrid architectural systems that aim to symbiotically couple technical & living complexes, together with the development of complimentary design environments and design methodologies. Phil has pursued this research in the context of two EU funded Future and Emerging Technology (FET) projects – flora robotica and Fungal Architectures – and continues with the recently awarded EU EIC Pathfinder project Fungateria, for which Phil acts as coordinator.