ECOLOGIC STUDIO

text by Federico Giacomarra

Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto founded EcoLogic Studio in 2004. Their work focuses on the development and application of design methods in order to bring attention to the subject of urban sustainability. The self-organizing city is the theme of their last book. They both graduated from the Politecnico di Torino, and now live and work in London where they teach at the Architectural Association.

One of your latest projects is the Metropolitan Protogarden, in which the point of view is strongly focused on urban ecology.

MP: It is very important to focus on green developments in the city, not only because 80% of the world population is now urbanized, but also because it’s within cities that thoughts, cultures and new sensibilities emerge. This is where the possibility of creating a new rapport with the planet lies.

Protogarden gives shape to the idea of being able to transform cities through artificial ecologies into locations where you consume as well as produce with high efficiency.

CP: The project does not propose to revive the city as a single entity, where the master plan is top-down, ignoring its qualities, but instead it creates a city in which the citizen understands how to do things and participates in the creation of the city.

Do you make use of parametric tools in your designs?

MP: Yes, these techniques allow you to distance yourself from the idea of designing a single object and instead design entire systems that relate to each other. The use of parametric tools is not necessarily a step forward if it is not accompanied by new thoughts. You might use parametric techniques that in formal terms express a parametric variation, but which in reality are completely anchored to the idea of mechanical functionalism that comes directly from modernity.

Jencks says that form follows the function, but also follows meaning. Modernism has reduced such ideas to a single point of view, is there any new meaning left to discover?

MP: It’s about reeducating the people, and trying to rekindle within them their creative and playful side, removing their obsession with functionality and efficiency, but instead stimulating an interest in using new tools and building things with new meanings, new possibilities.