The Ecological Turn: Design, Architecture and Aesthetics beyond “Anthropocene”

How does the ecological thinking affect architects, designers and the design culture itself? The Anthropocene is a geological event, but also a political one that lies in overcoming the idea of crisis. Acknowledging this change means rethinking the very ecology of the project in environmental and atmospheric terms. The changes we face don’t depend on missing balances, but on compromises reached between conservation and exploitation. The Anthropocene is in our suggested reading the time of the end of our representations and the time of the beginning of other narratives that belong to a non-linear dimension. Anthropocene is a category which has the merit of challenging our conventions in an oblique manner by reconnecting the history of mankind with the history of the Earth. In this respect, design visions can be the tool for activating new relations. Within this process of change, how do the figures of architects and designers rethink their role, their knowledge, experimenting with new design approaches? The conference wants to explore these issues from different points of view, in particular the “socio-bio-geosphere in its uncertain becoming by making the disciplines of the project communicate and by varying the scale of analysis, from the molecular scale of the environmental effects on our heritage, to that of the world’s flow of goods and capital.