Decentralised geometries and thinkings
I’m an architect, computational designer, and researcher, based in Lisbon. I completed my studies at Budapest University of Technology, and after gaining 4 years of experience working in Hungarian, Portuguese and Dutch architecture studios, I started my independent practice, an investigation in low-tech comfort and aesthetics, using alternative materials and fabrication methods, collaborating with local experts on natural construction.
Lately I have been researching Nature as a complex emergent system and evolutionary optimisation, which lead to collaborations with individuals and companies to develop Nature-based-solutions. These urban projects aim to mitigate biodiversity-loss, extreme weather, and harmful resource management in cities.
I also investigate the spatial aspect of the human mind, in connection with perception and memory, which has led to experimental apps, installations, and walks.
Nature’s richness, complexity, and dynamic stability is the result of its individual, less complex, less stable parts. The system emerges from the lower level organisms, which emerge from the lower level cells, following simpler rules. In architecture this might be true for certain scales and contexts, such as urbanisation and participatory design, but in others, the process is mainly top-down. This project is an investigation of introducing decentralised, agent based thinking in novel scales and contexts of the built environment, and seeking new emergence, while building a shared language with Nature for future collaboration.
Instead of following a blueprint, termites apply their decentralised intelligence to build mounds, where the individuals of a hive follow simple rules, reacting to change in airflow, humidity, soil, and previous actions by other members. Coral reef is again a geometry emerging from the lower level behaviour of food-seeking coral polyps. Non living agents such as wind, waves, waterdrops, ice also create feedback loops to form the surface of the Earth. I envision different ways of collaborating with these natural agents and systems in the future, both in the design and fabrication process. Therefore I start by computationally simulating these agents, and will continue to invite them to co-produce.
Primarily the project aims to establish a communication with Natural complexity. Apart from enabling life to merge with these surfaces, it also relaxes the human brain, as it evolved for millions of years interacting with this organised complexity. Secondly, the project aims to think about the different human built environments through the lenses of agents and rules. How do human intersubjective realities create the simple rules of the emergent built environment? And how could we overwrite some of these in the era of regeneration?