ILARIA DI CARLO
Ilaria Di Carlo is an architect, urban planner, writer and researcher. Graduated with Honours at the Polytechnic of Milan in 2000, she obtained a Master in Landscape Urbanism at the Architectural Association in London the following year.
She has worked for different international offices and was an Associate at Skidmore Owings and Merrill, London. In 2011 she founded her own practice Ilaria Di Carlo Architects, a multidisciplinary award winning design research based company.
In 2016 Ilaria concluded her PHD research in Environmental Engineering at the University of Trento, obtaining the title of Doctor Europaeus with the her thesis entitled “The Aesthetics of Sustainability. Systemic thinking and self-organization in the evolution of cities” which also became a book.
Her academic work includes teaching as a Visiting Professor at the Polytechnic of Milan, the University of Westminster, the University of Trento, The Iceland Academy of Arts, the Universidad Torquato Di Tella in Buenos Aires and from 2009 to 2013 she was appointed UCL Teaching Fellow in the Master in Urban Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.
She is currently Lecturer in History& Theory tutor in the B-Pro MArch in Urban Design (RC15) and in Architectural Design (RC8) at the Bartlett, UCL.
She is also Co-Director of the AAVisiting School Milan called Resilient Skin Code, a joint venture between the Architectural Association in London and the Polytechnic of Milan.
Her research interest focus on the importance of aesthetics, revisited through the lenses of systemic thinking, complexity theory and transdisciplinarity, in the sustainable design of city and territory.
She has worked for different international offices and was an Associate at Skidmore Owings and Merrill, London. In 2011 she founded her own practice Ilaria Di Carlo Architects, a multidisciplinary award winning design research based company.
In 2016 Ilaria concluded her PHD research in Environmental Engineering at the University of Trento, obtaining the title of Doctor Europaeus with the her thesis entitled “The Aesthetics of Sustainability. Systemic thinking and self-organization in the evolution of cities” which also became a book.
Her academic work includes teaching as a Visiting Professor at the Polytechnic of Milan, the University of Westminster, the University of Trento, The Iceland Academy of Arts, the Universidad Torquato Di Tella in Buenos Aires and from 2009 to 2013 she was appointed UCL Teaching Fellow in the Master in Urban Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London.
She is currently Lecturer in History& Theory tutor in the B-Pro MArch in Urban Design (RC15) and in Architectural Design (RC8) at the Bartlett, UCL.
She is also Co-Director of the AAVisiting School Milan called Resilient Skin Code, a joint venture between the Architectural Association in London and the Polytechnic of Milan.
Her research interest focus on the importance of aesthetics, revisited through the lenses of systemic thinking, complexity theory and transdisciplinarity, in the sustainable design of city and territory.
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Papers by ILARIA DI CARLO
Aiming at a new conceptualisation of collaborative design processes as digital and material contaminations capable to blur boundaries and territories by challenging the current notions of authority and power structures, the paper explores the epistemology described by the intersection of post-humanist aesthetics and theory of automated cognition through the lens of an affectual and transindividual understanding of collectiveness.
In this perspective we firstly outline how an expanded notion of agency as vascularised collective, a confederation of human and non-human elements, biological and artificial entities entails new questions on equality, accountability, and moral responsibility in an era of climate catastrophe and increasing instability. In this context the processes of cognition itself becomes pervasive and transcalar and is reassessed with consideration of the sub-conscious nature of its construct before the idea of a coevolutionary cognitive infrastructure based on the principles of indeterminacy is introduced as a model for the collaborative automated cognition of human and non-human agencies. This is a concept that particularly in the context of creative spatial practices, should be considered in its intersection with Simondon’s theory of information , taking in consideration the plastic and tropistic properties of the system, as also expressed in the early work on chemical computers by Gordon Pask .
The points made above attempt to account for the multidimensional consequences altering the creative processes as a result of the construction of a collective authorship as an inherently transindividual practice. These implies a series of strategies oriented towards the definition of emergent meaning potentially able to capture the weaker voices and signals, including a focus on the diverse sensual and affectual experience of the participants, the orientation towards procedural indeterminacy and the exploration of material intelligence.
This type of thinking, through a vibrant ecology of diverse forms of cognition, is choral, distributed and inclusive, exposing new models of democratic collective epistemological processes where new forms of authorship can emerge to compose unexpected dialogues and collective knowledge. Such Cartographies of Subjectivities create the potential for the affirmation of novel mediated urban narratives and aesthetics into a redefinition of the Human.
The result of such praxis is a deleuzian entanglement, where matter, technologies, all the living species and their relational roles in their aesthetic experiences, cognitive processes and de facto, affectual constructions are folded upon each other. This is a pervasive, transcalar and granular mist in a continuous status of change and becoming where the old notion of quality as an essential and pure identity related to cathartic categories such as the Beautiful and the Sublime, is substituted by a more diffused and impure one , set in digital and material contaminations.
This paper will investigate the possibility to look at Sustainability and Aesthetics through the lens of evolutive processes and the complexity theory to inform a new Bottom Up/Self Organized approach as a possible morphogenetic process for sustainable city design.
Often criticized as the theory of ‘out of control’ the complexity theory applied to the urban could instead be the enabler of a new paradigm where the notion of single authorship with intellectual ownership and his aesthetic language is substituted by the concept of a collective and a new aesthetics of choice where aesthetics might recover, according to the evolutionary theory, their essence of an ‘adaptive system’ and an ecological category.
La lezione ci arriva dalle avenguardie: la propensione verso lo scarto materialmente umile ma caricato esteticamente e concettualmente, è il potere della rivoluzione culturale ed economica dell’arte povera, ed è questo potere che bisogna analizzare per poter capire il significato estetico e poetico del rifiuto e delle potenzialità del riuso.
L’articolo illustra bervemente come la necessità di sviluppare una lettura eterodossa e quasi blasfema del rifiuto stesso, coltivando un ‘eros with dross ’, un’attrazione per lo scarto, prospettiva che è anche alla base del materialismo astratto del filosofo Slavoj Žižek, ha portato in campi diversi quali la fotografia, l’architettura e l’urbanistica, alla scoperta di una dimensione lirico - estetico - poetica che ha come soggetto il rifiuto stesso.
In quest’ ottica sono citati come esemplari le magnifiche fotografie di Edward Burtinsky: immagini di rifiuti, di scarti ammassati, ‘metafore di un dilemma’, come lui stesso le definisce. Il dilemma tra seduzione e paura: la seduzione del trash e la paura che il contenuto dell’immagine razionalizzata ne genera. Qui l’identità del rifiuto, dall’oggetto ammassato al paesaggio, coincide con la sua inutilità, marginalità, scomodità ,improduttività, o pericolosità mentre la sua qualità estetica fluttua nella serialità del prodotto, nella luce, nell’inquadratura, nella saturazione dei colori. Queste immagini rappresentano una risposta estetica appagante e allo stesso tempo ‘oscena’ a montagne di rifiuti, dove l’atto stesso dell’accumulare materia rimossa, che non ha più nessuno scopo, diventa un atto estetizzante basato sulla serialità dello scarto materico, la sua riproposizione continua, la ripetizione esponenziale delle sue caratteristiche e l’esposizione di infinite variazioni sul tema.
In architettura un esempio paradigmatico di questo stesso pensiero è il lavoro di Wang Shu e del suo Amateur Architecture Studio. Il loro concetto di rifiuto è strettamente connesso a quello di riuso, passaggio fondamentale perchè concede di passare dalla prospettiva negativa di abbandono e inutilità della scoria a quella strategica e virtuale del riuso che addirittura diventa una specie di firma stilistica e poetica.
E se in architettura si parla del riciclo di materiali e tecniche, in urbanistica il grande protagonista del rifiuto è lo spazio nella sua accezione specifica di vuoto. L’esempio citato è quello della Stalking Detroit di Charles Waldheim che ci ha insegnato che anche il vuoto, come rifiuto generato dalla ritrazione del tessuto urbano della città fordista, strategicamente recuperato e pianificato può passare da lutto urbano a strumento di rinascita identitaria con valenze estetico-simboliche.
L’articolo si conclude con la considerazione che un’estetica del rifiuto esiste e potrebbe esprimersi, simbolicamente, come cura ed elaborazione dell’abbandono che per mani amorevoli si avvia a nuova vita.
Conference Presentations by ILARIA DI CARLO
The research for a new alliance between humans and nature proposed by Prigogine and Stengers calls for a new view of human systems and of the relations they establish with the environment [1] with sustainability as an aim as well as defending the opportunities for a new hermeneutic of the city which will bring along a new language and aesthetic.
The key to such a challenge resides within the concept of transdiciplinarity, a synthesis between disciplines that destroys academic barriers and creates new disciplines in which everything is more than the sum of the parts and which has something to do with the complexity theory. Its essence lies in combining pre-existing elements to create new synapses.
We will look at how the evolutionary theory, the complexity theory, systemic thinking and the contemporary debate on sustainability and ecology have radically changed the approach to the design of city and territory and, in particular, to the historic dichotomy between Top Down versus Bottom Up model and the emergence of the self-organized city as possible morphogenetic process for sustainable city design.
In general terms we could argue that the point is a matter of order versus chaos whereby chaos we mean ‘not a cult topic but a dynamic state, its potential revealed by science, that can indicate the way to a more subtle and flexible order than simplification and repetition.’ [2]
Aiming at a new conceptualisation of collaborative design processes as digital and material contaminations capable to blur boundaries and territories by challenging the current notions of authority and power structures, the paper explores the epistemology described by the intersection of post-humanist aesthetics and theory of automated cognition through the lens of an affectual and transindividual understanding of collectiveness.
In this perspective we firstly outline how an expanded notion of agency as vascularised collective, a confederation of human and non-human elements, biological and artificial entities entails new questions on equality, accountability, and moral responsibility in an era of climate catastrophe and increasing instability. In this context the processes of cognition itself becomes pervasive and transcalar and is reassessed with consideration of the sub-conscious nature of its construct before the idea of a coevolutionary cognitive infrastructure based on the principles of indeterminacy is introduced as a model for the collaborative automated cognition of human and non-human agencies. This is a concept that particularly in the context of creative spatial practices, should be considered in its intersection with Simondon’s theory of information , taking in consideration the plastic and tropistic properties of the system, as also expressed in the early work on chemical computers by Gordon Pask .
The points made above attempt to account for the multidimensional consequences altering the creative processes as a result of the construction of a collective authorship as an inherently transindividual practice. These implies a series of strategies oriented towards the definition of emergent meaning potentially able to capture the weaker voices and signals, including a focus on the diverse sensual and affectual experience of the participants, the orientation towards procedural indeterminacy and the exploration of material intelligence.
This type of thinking, through a vibrant ecology of diverse forms of cognition, is choral, distributed and inclusive, exposing new models of democratic collective epistemological processes where new forms of authorship can emerge to compose unexpected dialogues and collective knowledge. Such Cartographies of Subjectivities create the potential for the affirmation of novel mediated urban narratives and aesthetics into a redefinition of the Human.
The result of such praxis is a deleuzian entanglement, where matter, technologies, all the living species and their relational roles in their aesthetic experiences, cognitive processes and de facto, affectual constructions are folded upon each other. This is a pervasive, transcalar and granular mist in a continuous status of change and becoming where the old notion of quality as an essential and pure identity related to cathartic categories such as the Beautiful and the Sublime, is substituted by a more diffused and impure one , set in digital and material contaminations.
This paper will investigate the possibility to look at Sustainability and Aesthetics through the lens of evolutive processes and the complexity theory to inform a new Bottom Up/Self Organized approach as a possible morphogenetic process for sustainable city design.
Often criticized as the theory of ‘out of control’ the complexity theory applied to the urban could instead be the enabler of a new paradigm where the notion of single authorship with intellectual ownership and his aesthetic language is substituted by the concept of a collective and a new aesthetics of choice where aesthetics might recover, according to the evolutionary theory, their essence of an ‘adaptive system’ and an ecological category.
La lezione ci arriva dalle avenguardie: la propensione verso lo scarto materialmente umile ma caricato esteticamente e concettualmente, è il potere della rivoluzione culturale ed economica dell’arte povera, ed è questo potere che bisogna analizzare per poter capire il significato estetico e poetico del rifiuto e delle potenzialità del riuso.
L’articolo illustra bervemente come la necessità di sviluppare una lettura eterodossa e quasi blasfema del rifiuto stesso, coltivando un ‘eros with dross ’, un’attrazione per lo scarto, prospettiva che è anche alla base del materialismo astratto del filosofo Slavoj Žižek, ha portato in campi diversi quali la fotografia, l’architettura e l’urbanistica, alla scoperta di una dimensione lirico - estetico - poetica che ha come soggetto il rifiuto stesso.
In quest’ ottica sono citati come esemplari le magnifiche fotografie di Edward Burtinsky: immagini di rifiuti, di scarti ammassati, ‘metafore di un dilemma’, come lui stesso le definisce. Il dilemma tra seduzione e paura: la seduzione del trash e la paura che il contenuto dell’immagine razionalizzata ne genera. Qui l’identità del rifiuto, dall’oggetto ammassato al paesaggio, coincide con la sua inutilità, marginalità, scomodità ,improduttività, o pericolosità mentre la sua qualità estetica fluttua nella serialità del prodotto, nella luce, nell’inquadratura, nella saturazione dei colori. Queste immagini rappresentano una risposta estetica appagante e allo stesso tempo ‘oscena’ a montagne di rifiuti, dove l’atto stesso dell’accumulare materia rimossa, che non ha più nessuno scopo, diventa un atto estetizzante basato sulla serialità dello scarto materico, la sua riproposizione continua, la ripetizione esponenziale delle sue caratteristiche e l’esposizione di infinite variazioni sul tema.
In architettura un esempio paradigmatico di questo stesso pensiero è il lavoro di Wang Shu e del suo Amateur Architecture Studio. Il loro concetto di rifiuto è strettamente connesso a quello di riuso, passaggio fondamentale perchè concede di passare dalla prospettiva negativa di abbandono e inutilità della scoria a quella strategica e virtuale del riuso che addirittura diventa una specie di firma stilistica e poetica.
E se in architettura si parla del riciclo di materiali e tecniche, in urbanistica il grande protagonista del rifiuto è lo spazio nella sua accezione specifica di vuoto. L’esempio citato è quello della Stalking Detroit di Charles Waldheim che ci ha insegnato che anche il vuoto, come rifiuto generato dalla ritrazione del tessuto urbano della città fordista, strategicamente recuperato e pianificato può passare da lutto urbano a strumento di rinascita identitaria con valenze estetico-simboliche.
L’articolo si conclude con la considerazione che un’estetica del rifiuto esiste e potrebbe esprimersi, simbolicamente, come cura ed elaborazione dell’abbandono che per mani amorevoli si avvia a nuova vita.
The research for a new alliance between humans and nature proposed by Prigogine and Stengers calls for a new view of human systems and of the relations they establish with the environment [1] with sustainability as an aim as well as defending the opportunities for a new hermeneutic of the city which will bring along a new language and aesthetic.
The key to such a challenge resides within the concept of transdiciplinarity, a synthesis between disciplines that destroys academic barriers and creates new disciplines in which everything is more than the sum of the parts and which has something to do with the complexity theory. Its essence lies in combining pre-existing elements to create new synapses.
We will look at how the evolutionary theory, the complexity theory, systemic thinking and the contemporary debate on sustainability and ecology have radically changed the approach to the design of city and territory and, in particular, to the historic dichotomy between Top Down versus Bottom Up model and the emergence of the self-organized city as possible morphogenetic process for sustainable city design.
In general terms we could argue that the point is a matter of order versus chaos whereby chaos we mean ‘not a cult topic but a dynamic state, its potential revealed by science, that can indicate the way to a more subtle and flexible order than simplification and repetition.’ [2]