ABSTRACT
Today we live in the Anthropocene, when human technology affects virtually every ecosystem on Earth. Conversely, we are in an age of ubiquitous computing where the miniaturisation and distribution of digital systems has reached inhuman complexity and unpredictability. Human creations such as urban infrastructures now constitute new natures.
The entire Biosphere is mutating into the Urbansphere, a stack of informational, material and energetic networks which support our society’s increasingly demanding metabolism. We all inhabit the Urbansphere, which calls for architects to curate spatial knowledge across its domains.
Liberated from the restraining boundaries of green ideology, the performative design practice described here reveals the beauty found in the abstract dimension of Urbanspheric computation as well as in the most mundane aspects of urban infrastructure. As data, molecules and cells become materials of design, architecture is now defined by an evolving collection of spatial protocols of com-putation (as in collective thinking) and practices of cultivation (as in growing knowledge).
