Students:

Teh Aline Li Wain
Lim Shaun
Yu Xiangying
Ho Shing Shing
Wang Elaine

Year

2021

Tutors:

  • Stefan Laxness
  • Pablo DeSoto

Brief

‘Bio-cultural heritage’ (BCH) can be understood as the biological manifestations of culture found in domesticated landscapes resulting from long-term biological and social relationships. It emerges from ecological niches created directly or indirectly as we transform our environment for agriculture, industry, and infrastructure.

New science and interdisciplinary approaches are reshaping how we understand ecosystems structures, function, and processes, highlighting the interconnectedness between them and our built environment. The challenges brought about by the climate crisis are forcing us to revisit and ultimately revalue these bio-cultural links. Compelling us to adopt a generative and reproductive interdependency with our ecosystem.

In ‘Bio-Cultural’, we proposed Bio-Cultural Architecture. Devices which generate the ecosystems of tomorrow and strengthen our interdependence. Spatial interventions designed to produce a measurable interaction between our ecosystem and our built environment. Architectural objects imagined for multi-species inhabitation.
We designed how they perform, how they are inhabited by humans and nonhumans. We explored them as artifacts for nurturing companion species relationships and entanglements. Finally, we speculated on the outcome of our Bio-cultural architecture, by simulating how they decay and leave traces over time.

Project:

The Hollow Ecology Network

Student:

Aline Teh

Brief:

Bio-cultural heritage can be understood as the biological manifestations of culture found in domesticated landscapes resulting from long-term biological and social relationships. It is the past, present and future production of architectural and spatial interventions designed to generate a measurable interaction between cultures and ecosystems.

The expansion of Melbourne city has led to the movement of powerful owls from the dense forest into open dry woodlands in the suburban and urban areas. This has led the city has become an artifact for multispecies cohabitation that encourages interspecies sensitivity and communication.

“Can large containers of organic matter become shelters that sits in unexpected corners of the city and hence reactivate the area into a symbiotic space that encourages more-than-human sociabilities?”

Project:

The Mangrove Bio-Block

Student:

Shaun Lim

Brief:

This project studies the Bio-Cultural heritage observed after decades of Nuclear testing on the Marshall Islands, a collective of Atolls found within the Pacific Ocean. As we revisit artifacts of the nuclear age; we also take steps forward into the age of the Anthropocene

By investigating the possibilities of a time-lost portion within the Atoll’s ecotone, we propose Bio-Cultural Architecture: devices that instigate the growth of mangroves as a response towards the impending urgencies of the Anthropocene.

“Can we generate a low-tek anthropogenic island as a buffer from the nuclear age?”

Additional student projects: