METABOLIC BODYING

Valerio Franzone: What sparked your understanding of metabolism as a potential key to addressing the current environmental crisis and informing critical approaches to design? In architecture, the term “metabolism” refers to the Japanese movement. What you propose is not about giving a physical shape to systems, but incorporating their processuality into architecture.

Lydia Kallipoliti: In Japan, metabolism means impermanence and renewal. The Metabolist movement in the 1950s and 60s was related to rebuilding a national identity after World War II. In this context, it was primarily a metaphor for formal production: how the body’s mechanisms of evolution could reshape architecture. Our approach is different, as we understand and engage with metabolism literally, via matter. For us, metabolism is directly linked to the ways in which architecture can generate resources, digest its own waste, and decompose on a material level, which is linked to resource recirculation and regeneration in the built environment. We want to explore how architecture itself can become a metabolic system through understanding its entanglement with biopolitics and excremental processes. Excrement is key because it reveals how we interact with waste in urban and domestic environments, and how we design infrastructures to hide and outsource waste, making it invisible.

Areti Markopoulou: Buildings are already metabolic. They continuously breathe air, exchange heat, consume energy, and produce waste. Engaging with metabolism means confronting the visceral processes of life itself: digestion, fermentation, composting, and the flows through which bodies, infrastructures, and ecosystems are bound together. When we speak of metabolic architecture, we imagine spaces that are both inhabited and alive, actively participating in cycles of transformation. A kitchen, for instance, becomes a site of fermentation and growth; a toilet is no longer an endpoint of waste but part of a nutrient loop, returning value to gardens and soils; walls and surfaces are made of digested matter mediating between the domestic sphere and the ecological systems outside. Such a shift compels us to confront the ethical and political stakes of design since every architectural act is embedded within ecological entanglements that extend far beyond the walls of any single home.

Are you proposing techno solutions?

LK: Buildings are inherently metabolic, yet architects do not design infrastructure for the flow and exchange of matter. This responsibility falls to engineers. This is not just an engineering problem, but also a social, cultural, and existential problem. In our work, we do not embrace quick, automatic solutions to separate “clean” from “dirty” or conceal material conversions. Our project, which we often call a stage set or a testing lab, enables individuals to create new programmatic alliances in the domestic ecosystem, ones that require active bodily co-production with space. Digestion and fermentation processes require new relationships and cohabitations within the spaces we occupy. Labor as care is an essential part of the project.

AM: Our work is sometimes misunderstood as aiming for a purely technocratic or automated model, which is really far from what we’re doing. The Metabolic Home is really more of a living assemblage than a traditional building. Its effectiveness relies on collaboration and exchange, not on seamless automation or hands-off control. It challenges the Modernist idea that technology moves in a straight, linear path toward progress and proposes a model that’s participatory: a model that embraces complexity and interdependence, where design isn’t about perfect control but about working with messy, real-world systems.

This proposal would create a cultural and economic shift away from capitalism and its extractive dominance. Metabolism, understood as individuals’ participation in wider processes affecting communities and landscapes, could also be an antidote to environmental inequality.

AM: In capitalist economies, the linear model of extraction, production, consumption, and disposal is built on inequality. Extraction depletes resources and harms marginalized territories; production often depends on cheap labor; and disposal happens in places already burdened by social and environmental injustice. Meanwhile, consumption and comfort are concentrated elsewhere, detached from the true costs of this system. When, for instance, we discuss how food waste can become compost within the home, design moves a step further from just reducing waste. It brings communities together, creates commons, and redistributes nutrients and resources back to the environment. We are shifting away from the understanding of architecture as a finished product to recognizing it as an ongoing process that mediates flows of matter, energy, and value. This shift allows us to break the linear systems of inequality and find new frameworks to protect and empower marginalized communities and ecologies.

What will happen to those who cannot afford a metabolic home? Is there a risk that a self-sufficient home will participate in the demolition of any remaining urban welfare system?

LK: This is an important question. The concept of energy autonomy gained popularity in the 1960s and 70s, particularly with the development of the first experimental ecological houses, which were a form of anarchist rebellion against the power grid. Proposing an autonomous house today implies a detachment from the commons. As I also discuss in my book The Architecture of Closed Worlds (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2018), self-sufficiency is a utopian fantasy because all of these communities have failed in different ways, whether due to technological limitations — such as attempting to be 100% off-grid — or social issues. We are not discussing zero-waste solutions or 100% energy autonomy; rather, we propose a regenerative approach to recirculating materials and resources through microgrids, where certain flows can be rerouted, while others are sent back to the macrogrid.

Paraphrasing Bernard Rudofsky, when he was talking about the street, we could say that the home is a whole that depends on architecture and humanity. Doing so would also focus attention on our daily rituals, an essential element of domesticity. If the home becomes instrumental to metabolic functioning, where does the humanity of domesticity remain?

LK: We used the home both in the Tallinn Biennale and in the book because it is an extension of the body’s metabolism. After all, it’s where we perform all of our metabolic functions as part of our daily routine. The home has historically been a genealogy of experimentation, but it’s interesting how the home has not undergone any significant typological reconfiguration for a long time. I had a fascinating discussion with Emanuele Coccia about this. In his wonderful book, Philosophy of the Home: Domestic Space and Happiness (Penguin, 2024), he also described the home as a laboratory of cohabitation. He asked me why we need metabolic and planetary homes, as they could signal a sense of totality and a systemic view of the world. But the home is also a place where various identities, political regimes, everyday practices, and forms of intimacy are contested. This transscalarity is not a totality where everything is interconnected, but a place where things are rehearsed and experimented with. It’s not a perfect system without loss, but more an experiment in the making.

I agree. In fact, the humanity I’m talking about is also about establishing new processes between different systems — precarious and ever-changing entanglements — like digestion and fermentation. I used to make yogurt through the bacterial fermentation of milk. It was a ritual about life — the life of the bacteria and mine — and digestions at various scales.

AM: Precisely. We need to realize that what happens in our bathroom is not independent of what happens outside of our home. Understanding these interdependencies may open up innovative scenarios at different scales: toilets participating in global fertilizer economies, or kitchen compost that connects to global agricultural systems. Realizing that collective micro-scale actions can catalyze macro-scale transformations is the first step to collapse the boundary between the intimate and the planetary.

Can we discuss the book’s structure? Building Metabolism’s sections are organized according to the domestic spaces and consider the home’s relationships at a planetary scale. Then, for each room, you repeat three sections: the narrative, essays, and cookbooks.

AM: The book deepens the research we initiated at the 2022 Tallinn Biennale, where we first began to methodologically prototype these experimental ideas. It is not conceived as a catalogue but as a speculative and pedagogical tool. It has a deliberately repetitive structure. Each domestic space serves as a thematic lens, with three parallel layers of content: narratives, essays, and cookbooks. The narrative encourages imagination and speculation. The essays offer a broader context that encompasses history, philosophy, politics, and ecology. The cookbooks serve to translate theory into practice, utilizing recipes as a DIY process; their reading can be personalized to suit individual tastes and localized needs. However, it’s also practical, creating a “how to” guide that follows step-by-step processes. There’s also two additional sections: the “Planetary Home,” which explores how microdomestic actions reverberate at planetary scales, and the “Suffix – The Archeology of Architecture and Food,” which Lydia developed with Sonia Ralston and Sanjana Lahiri, as well as with her students at the Cooper Union.

LK: The suffix is a minor history of how architecture is entangled with food — how food is produced, harvested, curated, distributed, and consumed, as well as how buildings can be imagined themselves as food: decaying and feeding other spaces. The archeology of architecture and food explores the broader network of human, more-than-human, biotic, and abiotic factors that are implicated in processes of food production, consumption, and decomposition in constellations of material and political spatial interrelationships. It was important to explore the construction of the dinner table as an intersection of social protocols and geopolitical histories. In many ways, food visualizes a cross-section of capitalism fueled by the long history of natural resource extraction, industrialization, and marketing. Therefore, the provisioning of food directly impacts how space is formed, territories are shaped, and how geopolitical power is organized through flows of information and capital.

The format of the cookbook, which you used as a design template in the book, organizes and shares knowledge as plural and diverse, to examine modernity and its crises. Cookbooks often foreground relational thinking, material interactions, and indigenous or non-Western epistemologies. Are you looking for alternatives to modernity?

AM: Modernity has placed humans firmly at the center of design, positioning architecture as finished and complete, privileging control, optimization, and standardization. This often clashes with the messier reality of life, full of agents and forces that we cannot fully predict or control. Take, for example, the growth of fungi. If we treat fungi as a building material, what does it mean to work with something that is uncontrollable, variable, and non-homogeneous, something whose form and lifespan evolve in ways we cannot entirely anticipate? It forces us to confront fundamental questions: how can you design a system when you cannot predict its aesthetics, decay, or the forms of maintenance it will require over time? We challenge modernity, not by simply rejecting it or offering a neat alternative, but by opening a space for questioning that asks how we might design with — and within — processes that exceed human control. Our goal is less about delivering definitive answers and more about cultivating a practice where architecture becomes a negotiation between human intention and the unruly vitality of the world around us.

LK: I agree that modernity is synonymous not only with control but also with comfort, automation, and rapid problem-solving. Yet, challenging the norms of modernity is not just about designing spaces differently; we must explore alternative ways of existing with our spaces. The entire system that shapes the built environment is beginning to crack, and responding to this requires alternative modes of living, relating, and cohabiting. It’s also essential to note that our project is situated on an existing site within a dense urban environment. We both come from Greece, and we positioned the project within the polykatoikía, the typical multi-story residential building unit where 80% of people reside in urban environments. Many of these buildings are nearing the end of their lives due to the lifespan of concrete, and consequently, our project is like a pixel within a dense urban space — small in scale, but indicative of how cities will adapt as their foundational structures deteriorate.

I’m interested in understanding architecture and design through various forms of practice and not just the profession. Curatorial, editorial, pedagogical, research, activist, and professional practice are not independent activities; rather, their entanglements inform the same multifaceted thing: architecture. How do different forms of practice intertwine in your work?

AM: Our work unfolds in environments where we question the systems and paradigms that shape design. This requires us to speak critically, whether within academia or in the broader cultural and political sphere. Much of my work extends beyond the academy. Through publicly funded research collaborations with cities, industries, and research centers, we develop pilot projects that challenge building and urban planning regulations. These projects emerge from real conditions, where we negotiate with multiple actors including communities, ecosystems, and infrastructures, while navigating their frictions. In this way, each project is both a laboratory and a political act, testing how design can become a tool for systemic change. This is why I see multiple forms of practice as profoundly interconnected. Curatorship becomes a public arena for raising awareness. Writing generates new knowledge or reframes outdated narratives. Pedagogy is equally vital: my students’ questions push me to re-examine my assumptions and co-create new imaginaries. And, of course, design remains the medium through which these ideas take form and agency. When working with new ideas, there are often no precedents to fall back on. This compels us to move fluidly across practices, engaging diverse stakeholders and forms of knowledge. This approach acknowledges that architecture is never singular or fixed, but continuously plural, dynamic, and in flux.

LK: It’s a crucial question because the word “interdisciplinarity” is overused in architecture; it is often just a label. In my view, “interdisciplinary” work — bringing people from various disciplines together — differs significantly from “transdisciplinary” work. The latter creates a shared framework and a new paradigm in which disciplines co-produce a common approach. We both have diverse backgrounds in engineering, design, and the humanities, and our approach is grounded in an understanding of the practical limitations and possibilities, as well as how to achieve them. When we draw, everything originates from experiments, from data, and an understanding of how things work. Then, we switch from discussing the operation of a detail to discussing, for example, how Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (New York: Milkweed Editions, 2015), uses botany as a science to explain phenomena of growth, evolution, and transference of biotic matter, embracing different kinds of indigenous identities. The passage from one field to the other is beautiful, but it also requires a lot of precision and depth in each field of inquiry. Transdisciplinarity requires us to shift between different modalities to experience, analyze, and design, traversing various layers of thought and production.

What is next for you both?

AM: Our next step with the Metabolic Home is to move beyond the 1:5 model and create a full-scale pilot to test how these systems can be built, inhabited, and maintained over time. This means scaling up waste-based materials into actual housing elements, integrating technologies from fields such as chemistry and biology into domesticity, and even experimenting with neighborhood-scale infrastructures. We have emphasized many times that the Metabolic Home model presented at the Venice Biennale is not utopian, conceptual, or purely speculative. Almost all of the technologies it showcased already exist. The challenge now lies in their practical integration into the domestic environment. We envision collaborating with multidisciplinary teams of scientists, designers, and industries to make this vision a reality; a radical model for inhabiting dense cities, and, perhaps, a blueprint for a new business model for the future of housing.