Photo.Synth.Etica
Key Facts
Completed: 2018
Design: ecoLogicStudio (Claudia Pasquero, Marco Poletto, Konstantinos Alexopoulos, Michael Brewster, Shlok Soni, Robert Staples, Chrysi Vrantsi, Chia Wei Yang, Nico Aulitzky)
Engineering: Manja Van De Worp
Client: Climate KIC for Climate Innovation Summit 2018
Description
Photo.Synth.Etica, conceived by London-based architectural and urban design firm ecoLogicStudio in a partnered consortium with Urban Morphogenesis Lab – UCL and Synthetic Landscapes Lab – University of Innsbruck, has been presented in Dublin during the week of Climate Innovation Summit 2018. An “urban curtain”, it captures CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it in real-time: approximately one kilo of CO2 per day, equivalent to that of 20 large trees.
Designed to be integrated into both existing and new buildings, it is composed of 16,2 x 7 metre modules, each one functioning as a photobioreactor — a digitally designed and custom made bioplastic container — using daylight to feed the living micro-algal cultures and releasing luminescent shades at night.e relative organic molecular transactions in the biosphere”.
Unfiltered urban air is introduced at the bottom of the façade and air bubbles naturally rise through the watery medium within the bioplastic photobioreactors. CO2 molecules and air pollutants are captured and stored by the algae, and grow into reusable biomass. photosynthesized oxygen is then released from the top of each module.
Their serpentine design optimizes the carbon sequestration process, and contributes to ecoLogicStudio aim to symbolically embody a parallelism between the monetary carbon trading market and the transactions carried out by the molecules, as ecoLogicStudio’s founders say: “The message is one of spatial convergence and connectivity between the financial marketplace of cyberspace and the relative organic molecular transactions in the biosphere”.
Gallery
*Disclaimer
This project was conceived by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto of ecoLogicStudio and all content displayed on this page belongs to them. You can find out more about their work at www.ecologicstudio.com