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To design beyond this center takes more than a new aesthetic. It asks for a pedagogical and philosophical reorientation of the discipline itself.<\/p>\n
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At the Studio, we approach the built environment by cultivating multispecies encounters and learning from intelligences, both natural and artificial. Our role is slowly shifting from authoring to curating. If we are to design a postanthropocentric future, we need synthetic frameworks that deliberately bring back the encounters sanitised environments have foreclosed, and that allow collaboration across difference without presuming shared goals.<\/p>\n
![\"aditya](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Factory-5.0-04-10-24.1643-2.jpg\")
Factory 5.0 explores the role of non-human organisms in architectural design<\/p>\n
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GRADIENTS AS A FRAMEWORK FOR MULTISPECIES DESIGN<\/p>\n
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The framework we use is the gradient: the stepped values between two absolutes within a given domain of behaviour. I end up thinking of it as a computer language of \u201cones\u201d and \u201czeros\u201d. In landscape design, for instance, the differential fertility of soil can be read as a gradient of values between 0 and 1, defined relative to the region of intervention. By increasing or decreasing the density of these values, we raise or lower the resolution of the gradient, and that is what allows us to curate it.<\/p>\n
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When one gradient overlaps another, soil type with moisture or light for example, relationships begin to form at the intersections. These produce differentiated conditions that favour different species, microbial communities and other non-human actors.<\/p>\n
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This echoes Jakob von Uexk\u00fcll\u2019s notion of the Umwelt, where each organism perceives and acts within its own world, at its own scale. Such intelligences behave with more nuance than any designer could script. If we read these behaviours as micro-, inter- and intra-transactions, they can be incentivised or disincentivised, and the degree of sanitisation becomes a design parameter to be tuned rather than a binary condition to be enforced.<\/p>\n
![\"aditya](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Factory-5.0-04-10-24.0612.jpg\")
transparent acrylic enclosures house thousands of kingworms within the experimental pavilion<\/p>\n
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KINGWORMS AND THE ROLE OF NON-HUMAN ORGANISMS IN ARCHITECTURE<\/p>\n
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I explored this curatorial approach in Factory 5.0, a project investigating the material agency of non-human organisms. The pavilion was inhabited by thousands of kingworms within transparent acrylic enclosures, staging an encounter between a synthetic material and a biological agent. I wanted to understand what happens when another organism is allowed to take part in architecture\u2019s transformation, beyond the idea of a finished object.<\/p>\n
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The kingworms gnawed, perforated and consumed the polystyrene, altering its surface, mass and integrity at a pace, and with outcomes, that I could anticipate and curate but never entirely control. Ingestion, along with microbial activity in the worms\u2019 gut, also contributes to the degradation of polystyrene. I designed the pavilion to accommodate this ongoing process, which moved making away from fabrication and assembly towards a continuum that includes consumption, erosion and decomposition.<\/p>\n
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The worms were not merely occupants. Their actions became part of the pavilion\u2019s spatial experience.<\/p>\n
![\"aditya](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Factory-5.0-04-10-24.3092-2.jpg\")
kingworms gradually transform polystyrene through consumption, erosion and decomposition<\/p>\n
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WATER AS A DESIGN PARAMETER FOR POSTHUMAN ARCHITECTURE<\/p>\n
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Moisture is one of the most critical resources, and the most important medium for incentivising these transactions at both planetary and molecular scales. Water connects bodies across species and scales, which makes wetness a candidate for the primary gradient of inter-ecological interaction. It operates from the cell membrane to the watershed.<\/p>\n
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Almost like a fractalised logic, it connects planetary urbanism, utopian futures and molecular survival along a thin line. A post-human curatorial practice would begin by understanding survival transactions across species, and wetness is central to that understanding.<\/p>\n
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We are currently working on a modest residence in Lonavala, a hill station in the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, along the mountain corridor between Mumbai and Pune. Steep hills, seasonal streams and exceptionally heavy southwest-monsoon rainfall make the region ecologically rich. Yet the same landscape is increasingly a site of rapid construction, driven by demand for second homes and speculative land trading.<\/p>\n
As the built footprint expands, the relationship between architecture and the ecological systems that sustain the region becomes critical. For us, the question was not simply how to insert a house into this landscape. It was how the house could stay in conversation with the water, plants and pollinators that make the landscape what it is.<\/p>\n
![\"aditya](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/Proposed-Gradients_1_MIU_URAN_SAM.jpg\")
proposed gradients diagram maps different spatial conditions across the landscape<\/p>\n
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SUPPORTING BEES AND POLLINATORS THROUGH LANDSCAPE DESIGN<\/p>\n
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We began by considering how to re-integrate bees into the local ecosystem, not by introducing another species in isolation but by creating conditions that could support their presence. Bees depend on a distributed ecology of flowering plants, nesting opportunities, water and the seasonal rhythms that connect them.<\/p>\n
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This led us to treat wetness as a primary design parameter. Rather than draining rainfall quickly off the site, we are examining how its movement, accumulation and dispersion can be curated across the landscape. Gradients of moisture are informing the placement and selection of vegetation, creating differentiated conditions for plants with particular flowering cycles and, in turn, more sustained foraging opportunities for bees. The aim is to re-establish conditions for ecological transactions that become harder to sustain as habitats fragment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BEYOND HUMAN-CENTERED ARCHITECTURE \u00a0 \u201cPost-human utopias\u201d is a productive framework for asking what comes next for the built…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":955633,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[326590,76,354,355,49,48,356,75,292800,324288],"class_list":["post-955632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-aditya-mandlik","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-guest-essays","tag-posthuman-utopias"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=955632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/955632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/955633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=955632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=955632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=955632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}