Syntopic Architectures

»Syntopic Architectures« engages in structures for habitation, sourced from and embedded in the material cycles of a specific environment. The term ›syntopic‹ (noun: syntopy) has been coined by Luis Rene Rivas in 1964 and denotes the inhabitation of the same »macrohabitat« by »two or more related species«. It is a composition of the Greek words ›syn‹ meaning together and topos meaning place. To develop »Syntopic Architectures« thus means to create inhabitable structures with the place where they are built in.

The research strand will approach this aim by integrating different disciplinary perspectives, connecting design, materials science as well as cultural history and theory. Bringing together research from Adaptive Fibrous Materials, Tessellated Materials Systems and Active Trees – Knowledge Technologies Futures into a coherent research strand allows us to investigate the genealogies of architectural material systems, use site-specific biogenic materials and embed them into the very same local ecosystem. Making full-scale architectural prototypes, we learn about relevant material properties and how natural systems respond to environmental changes. Thinking through the non-sustainable legacies of the materials we are addressing – on anthropological, ecological and phylogenetic scales – provides a productive framework to strive for waste-less material networks. We thus question diverse functions emerging from living or non-living material systems and speculate about novel forms with multiple emerging functionalities and meanings.