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Digestion
Editors Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Lydia Kallipoliti, Areti Markopoulou
Contributors Mark Wigley, Lindsey Wikstrom, Mae-ling Lokko, Rolf Hughes, Rachel Armstrong, Meredith TenHoor, James Westcott, Juliet Haysom, Aude-Line Dulière, Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich, and more…

The waste products of a human body’s digestive system are connected to numerous treatment systems that allow it to be reincorporated into a wider ecological system; to continue circulating. The waste products of buildings, however, rarely do. In exceptional cases, the landfills to which most former buildings are destined become new land. But thinking what it would mean to build system capable of treating the food and the waste of a city itself—its building—would entail nothing short of radically rethinking what it means to build a city as such.

​Digestion is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale, supported by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), the Estonian Museum of Architecture, and Friendship Products.

 

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10 essays
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The Nursery
Reif Larsen
It must be said from the outset that Lila disagreed with the whole idea of Geffen’s father coming to live with them.
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Shifting Porosities
Jefree Salim, Zahirah Suhaimi, and Feifei Zhou
The interface between land and water is nature’s metabolic process. In this messy, everchanging, and unpredictable zone, different kinds of porosities emerge and become the birthplace of many more-than-human livelihoods. Water channels are nature’s blood vessel network.
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The Skillful Cook
Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich
What does it mean to be a skillful cook? Over the last several centuries, the skillful cook was arguably the one who most successfully healed the historical wounds of modernity by reconciling traditional dishes with modern techniques.
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Placeholders
James Westcott, Juliet Haysom, and Aude-Line Dulière
The term “circularity” implies a kind of supreme intentionality, where the lifecycle of a material has been pre-ordained by wise planners, long in advance of its “birth,” in a series of cute diagrams.
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Envisioning Future Food Systems
Meredith TenHoor
The challenges of repairing broken food systems in this time of dire climate crisis necessitates cross-scalar strategies.
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I, Holobiont
Rolf Hughes and Rachel Armstrong
Embryologically-speaking, your living home is grown from a primitive architectural streak which is cultured by hand in our studio using the stem cells that you provide.
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Hot Air Rising
Mae-ling Lokko
Hot, moist air has long been a powerful, yet largely invisible, working fluid in the colonial and modern enterprise. Processes of air conditioning represent acts of metabolism, ensuring the adaptation of air to the project of human domestication.
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A Gold Mine, Above Ground
Lindsey Wikstrom
Urban mining is the process of recovering materials that are lodged inside an already standing anthropic mass. Seeing material forms as resources rather than landfill waste can prevent mineral matter from being inefficiently re-buried.
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The Excremental Interior
Mark Wigley
Digestion turns the outside into an inside. Our organism is never simply in the world but an intricate folding of outside into an inside. More precisely still, it is a fold that produces the very sense of an outside by constructing an interior seemingly detached from it.
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Editorial
Nick Axel, Areti Markopoulou, Lydia Kallipoliti, and Nikolaus Hirsch
Digestion is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale, curated by Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou, featuring contributions by Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes; Montserrat Bonvehi-Rosich; Aude-Line Duliere, Juliet Haysom, and James Westcott; Reif Larsen; Mae-ling Lokko; Meredith TenHoor; Mark Wigley; Lindsey Wikstrom; and Feifei Zhou, Zahirah Suhaimi, and Jefree Salim.
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Category
Nature & Ecology, Urbanism
Subject
Architecture, Agriculture, Sustainability, Food & Cooking, Environment, Infrastructure

​Digestion is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale, supported by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), the Estonian Museum of Architecture, and Friendship Products.

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