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In considering landscape and architecture as phygital bodies, hydrodynamic data is used to generate synthetically sedimented interventions that diversify the lagoon’s local geomorphology. Embedded within these, a decentralised research facility and educational campus is proposed for a new inter-institutional department of geosciences for regional universities.
The project seeks to critique the anthropocentric relationship that the city has with its surroundings, and does so by functioning as a sand engine, an alternative approach to land reclamation that sustainably nourishes the lagoon’s starved sediment budget. Through its orchestrated deconstruction via controlled erosion, the dynamic system actively contributes to the regeneration of the wetland’s geomorphic diversity.
The proposal is an architecture that explores how digitally generated bodies of data can ingress reality to form a temporal, regenerative hybrid typology of alternative land reclamation and inhabitable structures embedded into the landscape.
Comprised of bio-composite components with varying material ratios, the building’s skin is graded to transition from dense, compacted sandstone on its perimeter, to lightweight, semi-translucent biopolymer shells facing inwards.
The overabundant algal biomass found in the lagoon becomes the source of a biopolymer binding agent for captured sediment that would otherwise be washed out into the Adriatic Sea, resulting in a building material akin to sandstone.
These islands are designed such that they embed the level of human inhabitation deeply within the artificial landscape, for what better way to study the lagoon’s saltmarsh wetlands than from within.
In exploring the notion of phygitality, the outgoing concept is that entities from either side of the phygital divide can cross over into the other – physical bodies can be digitalised, and digital bodies can materialise physically.