Symbiotic House at The Kampong

Symbiotic House Lectures
Symbiotic House is a project catalyzed by Lee Pivnik in 2022 to research and develop adaptive architectural solutions to Miami’s environmental precarity, and to conceptualize and design a “multi-use space for multi-species survival”. The project’s aim is to reimagine the home as a potential site for climate care, an active hub for offsetting carbon emissions, rewilding landscape, supporting biodiversity, and adapting to environmental change. Symbiotic House will ultimately manifest as a living earthwork that functions as a regenerative shelter and center for interdisciplinary art and ecology research in South Dade.

The project intends to broaden the design process so that the space emerges organically through communal workshops, open research, and constant feedback. It is meant to invite the local community of South Florida into a collective act of dreaming up new practices for how to best adapt to the intersecting climate and housing crises, so that the people living at the epicenter of these issues are treated as the experts in mitigating them.

The lecture series is $10 for all guests and free for members. The start time is 6:30 PM.

How can architects design the built environment to incorporate and nurture nonhuman habitat conditions? How might we consider flora and fauna, not only as part of our ecosystem, but also part of our communities? How do we design for the ‘collective,’ beyond human stakeholders? Reflecting on these questions, Joyce Hwang’s talk will focus on the work of her creative practice, Ants of the Prairie, which has been exploring questions of ecological thinking, species conservation advocacy, and climate justice for nearly two decades. The discussion will address strategies for sustainable design to expand the consideration of animals, not only in terms of their important roles as “ecosystem services,” but also the potential toward agendas of spatial experience, care, ethics, and identity.

Daniel Ayat will trace the long history of how and why the body and the city have been co-constructed. This reassessment of the relevance and potentials of this notion in the 21st century will insist upon the political significance of the organization of the city and reframe how the paradigms of health and wealth are defined. By problematizing some of the underpinning tenets of ecological and economical thought, this discussion will aim to explore the ethics of how we participate (or not) in the representations, perceptions, and expectations of how we practice everyday life and of how we might collectively begin to situate its risks as a historical problem.

Mamoun Nukumanu explores symbiotic co-creation with earth beings. He is focused on becoming-with trees through the creation of site specific sculptures utilizing local materials. We dream reality into being, and Mamoun’s dream is a reality composed of multilayered living infrastructures that unify human and environmental health in the creation of symbiotic harmonies. The intensification of anthropogenic influences on the biosphere calls for the creation of new mythologies grounded in symbiopoiesis, the interwoven co-formulation of self and world through mutual recognition and entanglement. Mamoun’s work explores biomaterials, ranging from fungal mycelium, bacterial cellulose, and microalgae, to living trees. Through the formation of rituals that recognize the life force of the organisms with which he collaborates, an art piece emerges as a conversation between beings, a symbiotic dalliance, through which both self and other are remolded. He is currently beginning on a journey to form a dialogue with trees through the conception of evolutionary architecture that grows alongside its human inhabitant.