Designing with Living Systems

ARCH 536 is a graduate-level seminar that examines productive systems essential to the integration of food cultivation into cities and buildings through the lens of aquaponics. The seminar asks, how can this circular food production method be successfully integrated into urban economies while benefiting the larger Food-Water-Energy nexus?

Students engage in a wide variety of tasks:

  • Research and analysis of aquaponic systems  on multiple scales from microbiological to building and urban scale
  • Case study identification and documentation, used to show how urban agriculture can cultivate new spatial, architectural, and resource conservation practices.
  • Cultivation of strategies for the visualization and graphic representation of complex, cyclical systems and dynamic processes.

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