Factory of Ecology
Mostly guided by financial profitability, efficiency has long been the hallmark of urbanizing processes. As a criticism to this point of view, this project simulates urbanizing efficiency while promoting the emergence of a new urban nature.
As most urbanized environments, this Factory of Ecology is built with multiple arrays of industrialized and prefabricated components. In this factory, however, the components appear to have been wrongly assembled. For example, water channels are blocked, roofs are displaced and misaligned allowing water to pour into the spaces they seemingly had to protect, retaining walls are incomplete, etc. The resulting environment appears to have been assembled following the usual building techniques but its results are irrational and illogical—at least according to the prevailing efficient ethos.
Through ten urbanizing machines, this factory triggers ground disturbances as conditions apropriate for plant growth. With the use of assembly errors, absurd mismatches, missing components, induced cracks, and other building defects, this environment seeks the ground to collapse, the soil to erode, the water to flood, the snow to collect, and weeds to grow.
There are ten machines in this factory:
1. The rain collector is a building with a displaced roof.
2. The weed farmer triggers cracks due to tiles with different thermal behaviors.
3. The rock house shelters a boulder while also exposing it to weathering.
4. The crowd leader encourages the repetitive emergence of paths.
5. The snow accumulator is a ramp that leads to nowhere.
6. The weed container is a wire fence that encloses a space inaccessible to humans.
7. The grove cultivator drives water back and forth.
8. The puddle maker holds water under the disguise of parking dimensions.
9. The soil disturber is an unfinished retaining wall.
10. The mud producer uses blocked channels to cause perpetual flooding.
This Factory of Ecology is a conscious effort toward the efficient assembly of apparent absurdity.
Project Data
Speculative project
2018
Designers
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro
Seok Min Yeo
Publications
