Building Metabolism

How can we design the architecture of metabolism? How can architecture redefine resources, produce nutrients and contribute to regenerate land and protect communities at risk? Building Metabolism aims to reveal how architecture constructs, distributes, and leverages power via material recycling, interspecies alliances, biopolitics and excremental processes.

This book, stemming from work exhibited at the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale—themed EDIBLE and curated by the authors—reimagines the “home” on both domestic and planetary scales as a digestive system, processing human output in its various forms and converting it into actionable resources. This portrayal of the “home” urges readers to look at resources in a visceral way; via the raw ecologies of our bodies and the understanding that the social problems related to climate justice are not simply statistical, abstract, and disembodied. Instead, they are intertwined with our own production and living processes, and they are landed on bodies: on the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.

Envisioning an architecture that produces resources, digests its waste, and decomposes itself, Building Metabolism challenges the extractive, consumptive, and contaminating logics of the built environment. Moving beyond an understanding of metabolism as a collection of inhabitable machines—which is a reading that carries the heavy burden of modernism—the book explores metabolism as patterns of energy and material generation and distribution within a multiverse. This reality does not tolerate traditional dichotomies of nature and artifice, humans and non-humans, resource, and waste; rather, it urges the emergence of a novel network of life and death and alternative forms of matter, including non-human agents, but also technological and cultural others.

RVTR's contribution Riverbend Agri-Commune presents a metabolic manefesto in the form of a recipe for the creation of a circular phalanstery at Riverbend Detroit developed through The M_NEX Food Energy Water Nexus project. A new agenda for systems based development must be articulated from an activist position to enable social change and  emancipatory alternatives.