Building Metabolism: Recipes for Food and Resource Cycles repositions architecture as a digestive system — one that processes human output, forges interspecies alliances, and converts waste into actionable resources at both domestic and planetary scales.
About This Book
Stemming from the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale, themed EDIBLE and curated by the authors, this book challenges the extractive logics that have long defined the built environment. Where modernism read metabolism as a collection of inhabitable machines, Kallipoliti and Markopoulou reframe it as patterns of energy and material generation within a multiverse — one that refuses the old dichotomies of nature and artifice, resource and waste. The argument is visceral by design: climate justice, the authors insist, is not abstract or statistical but landed on bodies, on the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. Essential reading for architects and designers working at the intersection of regenerative design, biopolitics, and ecological urbanism.
Key Features
- 384 pages of theoretical essays, project documentation, and speculative design propositions exploring architectural metabolism
- Authored by Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou, curators of the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale
- Published by Actar Publishers, 2022
What You'll Discover
- How architecture can be reconceived as a digestive system that produces nutrients, processes excrement, and decomposes itself — rather than merely consuming and contaminating
- The biopolitical dimensions of material recycling and excremental processes, and how these connect resource cycles to questions of climate justice and community resilience
- A critique of modernist metabolism that moves beyond the machine paradigm toward a multispecies, multi-material network of life, death, and transformation
- Why the social problems of climate crisis are inseparable from bodily experience — and how architecture might respond through non-human agents, technological others, and raw ecological alliances
About the Author
Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou are the curators of the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale, themed EDIBLE, from which this book developed. Their expanded collaborative work investigates the relationship between architecture, resource cycles, and ecological systems at both domestic and planetary scales.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 384
- Dimensions: 160 x 240 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781638401803
- Publisher: Actar Publishers
- Publication Date: 2022
Perfect For: Architects and designers working in regenerative design, sustainability researchers, academics and students in ecological urbanism, and practitioners interested in biopolitics, material cycles, and the politics of the built environment.