The project for a possible future of the city opens with a provocative question. “How could we, architects, be so confident that sustainability in the future will still lie in the field of bricks and mortar?” Learning from nature’s regulating processes, the author explores a set of fluid morphologies to derive an understanding of architecture in sync with the environment. Architecture, according to the project’s designer, can digitally reproduce the mechanisms at work in nature to produce architectural structures that can sustain themselves, while in symbiosis with nature. These forms and spaces (made of “digital multi-materials, nano-composites, natural vegetation, and holographic lasers”), are subsequently tested in a real context – in the city of Kazan. Here, the new structures are superimposing onto the heterogeneous city fabric to create a hybrid amalgam of entropic quality.

The jury enthusiastically endorsed the design’s bold visionary stance. The exploration – a research project in its own right – offers a discourse on possible forms of relationship between the built and the natural environment, offering strategies for perceiving architecture as a form of action in symbiotic relation with nature. While the project might benefit from some careful editing, the jury nonetheless commended the notion of design as a research platform to explore and discover yet uncharted terrain. The investigation furthermore calls for potentially new understandings of materials in construction, combining natural and digitally fabricated elements, while pushing the envelope of the discipline of architecture beyond established convention.