Constructed Ecologies will participate in the 2021 BioDesign Challenge in New York City. This course will look to the biological underpinnings of coastal infrastructure through material investigations and ecological performance. Currently, concrete, fiberglass or chemically treated wood are primary building materials for their ability to withstand the corrosive effects of salt water. But what if we rethink the degradation of materials as one of the drivers in design? How can materials augment ocean ecology? Do they become habitat for animals? Do they become integrated into the food web? Or do they simply breakdown and dissolve back to molecules?With guidance from design researchers in ecological materials at University of California at Davis, and synthetic biologists at University of California at San Francisco, we will rethink both materials and their fabrication. The work will be twofold. Firstly, the design of components that can be fabricated, deployed and tested in ocean water at one of two AEL (Architectural Ecologies Lab) physical research sites in the San Francisco Bay, and secondly, scaling up these components into speculative proposals which begin to rethink the public relationship between natural and constructed systems.

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