The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's "Living Structures" exhibition, running from November 8th, 2024, to March 23rd, 2025, features Deep Forest, a new installation by Prof Claudia Pasquero and Dr. Marco Poletto founders of architecture and design innovation firm ecoLogicStudio, together with academic partner Innsbruck University. This immersive work challenges traditional architectural paradigms by embracing the naturalization of architecture and technology, a direct counterpoint to modernist attempts to mechanize nature. The exhibition represents the culmination of twenty years of research in bio-digital design, showcasing the potential of symbiotic relationships between technology and the natural world within built environments.
Deep Forest's design is intrinsically linked to the Louisiana Museum's unique landscape. Utilizing locally sourced and manufactured materials, the installation centers around mycelium—the organism forming the "Wood Wide Web"—as a primary structural and organizational element. Mycelium dictates the spatial layout, aeration systems of photosynthetic reactors, and even visitor pathways. It also forms the basis of bio-degradable columns, demonstrating its multifaceted potential as a living architectural material.
This symbiotic relationship extends to photosynthetic microalgae, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem within the installation. The project integrates 102 salvaged birch trunks, hosting various fungal species, alongside 44 glass vessels containing cyanobacteria and seaweed, which supply the exhibition space with oxygen and actively sequester carbon dioxide.
Diving deeply into a forest means losing oneself in the multiplicity of interconnecting processes that define its very existence and with it our own identity. In our contemporary world, these processes are biological and digital, as both us and the forest are cyber-organic networks. Like the slime mound greeting visitors at the entrance of the Deep Forest exhibition, it serves as both a woodland fungus and a biological computer—a form of wetware AI infrastructure with the capacity to plan a city. - Prof. Claudia Pasquero, ecoLogicStudio's co-founder
The installation also showcases ecoLogicStudio's technological explorations. The 44 photosynthetic units, engineered by ecoLogicStudio, capture approximately 600g of CO2 per day, equivalent to a small mature forest. These units include both macroalgae species typical of the local shoreline and microalgae varieties of Spirulina SP. The biomass from these algae is also utilized in the 3D printing of 20 biodegraders at the University of Innsbruck's Synthetic Landscape Lab. These biodegraders have the ability to foster the growth of a new structural network.
The bio-fabrication process involves burying these synthetic mycelium trunks to allow for full development, resulting in aesthetically pleasing and mechanically resistant materials. The exhibition serves as a testament to the potential of bio-digital design in creating environmentally responsible architecture. It employs a micro-management pf natural processes like photosynthesis to grow sustainable architecture from urban waste. The installation serves a platform to showcase this research, alongside other related projects and relevant publications.
This is not the first collaboration between ecoLogicStudio and the Innsbruck University - Synthetic Landscape Lab, as in 2019, they also exhibited at the renowned Centre Pompidou in Paris exhibition, titled "La Fabrique du vivant" [The Fabric of the Living]. The installation examined the notion of "living" in a digital era through 3D printed living sculptures receptive to human and non-human life.
