Entangled: A Studio Project Building Ecology

Our identity as architects is still bound with the image of nature that places architecture and other human constructs strictly outside of a “wild” nature that is pure, vibrant, and untamed. This has resulted in nostalgic, exclusionary eco-narratives that curtail the architectural imagination. Understanding our role as part of an evolving ecology and its omnipresent human influence has the potential to reinvigorate the practice. Coexisting as interdependent entities (both physical and conceptual), landscape and technology can define built form that imagines productive and healthy infrastructures for a collective ecology. This paper describes the first of a set of studios run by the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning Ecological Practices Graduate Research Group, its collaboration with a parallel techniques course, and a local partner and the design build project it initiated, Silo City Trellis. The studio explored how to formulate an eco-centric identity through small scale architectural interventions, garden structures that literally and figuratively entwine themselves with the local ecology of a site that is at once a burgeoning “urban wild” and a monument to the city’s post-industrial heritage. This apparently wild site is in fact a garden. Maintained and curated, it highlights the effort it takes to maintain a “natural” environment in the highly synthetic urban context. The architecture of the garden makes it into an interface where the boundaries between nature and the man-made are perpetually negotiated providing a pedagogical model that proposes alternative ideologies about our ecosystems-both environmental and socio-political. Silo City Trellis is a combined structure and landscape regeneration system that literally entwines architecture earth and vegetation. Emulating the work of the site’s Director of Ecology the growing infrastructure aims to suggest ecocentric solutions for the future of cities by pushing the boundaries of architecture as a provider of ecosystem services and social stewardship. The proposal envisions that in a post-nature environment architecture can play a role not only in societal enlightenment but also in the intentional cultivation and stewardship of biological ecologies.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.109.29

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ISBN
978-1-944214-37-1