Morphological Urbanism

On December 12th I had the pleasure of joining the staff and students at The Bartlett's B-Pro Urban Design MArch programmes as external critic for the Research Cluster 15 [Cross-scale Design: The Amphibious Laboratory], and Research Cluster 16 [The Inhuman City, part of the Urban Morphogenesis Lab] programmes. The former led by Amphibious Lab co-founder Maj Plementias, the latter by ecoLogicStudio co-founder Prof. Claudia Pasquero and architect and computational designer Filippo Nassetti, RC15 explores the interface of cities and dynamic hydrological systems at a time of dramatically amplified, accelerating and evolving environmental change, and how architectural, urban and territorial design may adapt, whereas RC16 ‘aims to mobilise multiple forms of intelligence, human as well as non-human, to redefine the urban’, examining the potentialities of developments in fields including synthetic biology, bio-hacking, artificial intelligence, and nano-technologies. Having been aboard as a B-Pro Masters critic since 2014, I've witnessed the programmes go from strength to strength, as an ever greater number of future urban potentialities emerge. RC15 and RC16 academic year 2018 - 2019 cohort can take a bow for having delivered one of the most impressive term #1 prevention sessions yet. Populated by urban research projects exploring topics including how biocomputing can help make urban transport networks more efficient; the variances between terrestrial and marine collective living intelligence; non-human architectures; evolving amphibious architectures; and developing human applications for hydrological flows in estuaries, snapshots of works-in-research-and-development progress are pictured above and below.