Venetian Bladders investigates Venice’s environmental genesis; being symbiotically tied to its decentralised freshwater infrastructure which is formalised through its architectural form and urban cellularity. The only remaining early-modern infrastructure is the sewage system which currently discharges into the lagoon, destroying its ecology. In response, the Venetian government has commissioned three scales of inhabitable anaerobic digesters which convert organic waste into electricity, heat, and fertiliser for crop growth, in a feedback cycle.

Each design scale is formalised through a negotiation between systemic parameters and environmental volumetric data which together create morphogenic design responses, the geometry of which becomes a dynamic diagram of the forces acting upon it.

Scale one is an exo-digestion bodysuit which artificially extends the human metabolism to create electricity and defines design parameters to inform the proceeding proposals.

Scale two re-appropriates the defunct cisterns, as a highly contextual response to the city.

Scale three proposes a megastructure which houses vertical farms to complete the ecosystem and create a systemic feedback loop.