Interwoven landscape

Human specie has always engineered the environment to set the conditions for its own settlement, producing in its evolutionary development superorganisms (cities) and the necessary networks of connections among them. Instead of rejecting cars as an extraneous object to a picturesque nature, this project starts from a perspective in which cities and technology are the metabolic extension of human specie and therefore a necessary part of its own nature; the vessels (vehicles) for human transportation, or better, the vehicle-host symbiotic system thus becomes a necessary part of human ecology, and so the network of connections upon which they live, operate and interact with: infrastructures. The project of an environmental enhancer for the Nogara mare highway in Veneto (Italy) provides the unique chance to bring together ecological thinking, host interaction and active materials. Its location (an open country planar area among cultivated fields) enucleates as critical variables the impact of pollutants and the phenomenon of dazzling. With respect to such criticalities, the project uses digital generative and parametric strategies to generate a performative structure in which densification and rarefaction of elements is a local morphological response to dazzle. The structure itself acts as a scaffold for a photo catalytic PET based material that, mimicking the behavior of coccoluti (marine microorganisms) is able to reduce CO2 (and potentially other pollutants) to salts and nitrates that are then naturally deployed to the neighboring cultivated fields as fertilizers. The material has been tested for photo catalytic integration and is currently under development. Present building and production techniques privilege the industrial assembly of inert materials, with a one-way flow of energy and process from raw material to finished product. Instead of this mono-directional energy consumption the project promotes the continuous exchange of information (as code and matter-energy) at all levels and from the digital to the material domains: use of dazzle information, morphogenetic rules and structural behavior to generate the scaffold, a photo catalytic material that responds to pollutants and produces fertilizers, making the structure symbiotic with their hosts and the environment. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of APAAS