Invited Lecture / Museum Masterskaya Anikushina, St. Petersburg, Russia, June 2016
Merging Biology and Architecture
The Israeli Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
This lecture will revolve around the biological paradigm that draws increasing interest in the field of contemporary architecture. It enables new relations taking shape between human beings and their environment: From the nano-scale of individual cells to global environmental phenomena and from materials to the resulting structures and urban spaces they create. The new methodologies derived from this approach discard the binary distinction between nature and culture, positioning architectural construction as part of a larger ecosystem. The lecture will focus on the LifeObject exhibition which I co-curated for the Israeli Pavilion in Venice Biennale 2016. The exhibition was based on interdisciplinary research that investigated future directions in architectural practice through materiality, in order to more effectively broach mechanisms of formation and performance. The exhibition joined biomimetic practices along with practices of bio fabrication and synthetic biology.