PUBLICATION: Building Metabolism: Recipes for Food and Resource Cycles – Q4 2025

2025-05-11

Platform Urbanism has reactively pushed human interaction to forge an inhumane and phygital (physical and digital) uncanny relationship with their devices. Electronic devices and screens promote a form of reliance on daily human interaction, whereby ‘screens’ performatively acts as a form of mediator in how society intersects (or, interconnects) with physical space. Architecture is essentially a vessel through which communities are formed. WE-DESIGNS and team provides a “recipe” for an architectural and urban provocation that references ongoing research on digitalSTRUCTURES: Meta-Spaces-Restaurants.

Often, as architects, we facilitate, design, and enhance human-bond through shared experiences in physical space. digitalSTRUCTURES: Meta-Restaurants is a provocation that goes beyond the physical space. This series introduces a hybrid interior-architecture and screen-based research that questions the authenticity between relationships of how humans “stay in touch.”

This sliver of provocation is part of an ongoing research series of explorations on ‘digital domesticity’, published by ORO editions, authored by Wendy W Fok in: digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future engages with digital property and data infrastructures and explores new modes and impacts of data collection affecting architecture and urban infrastructure. Digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) and digital property require large amounts of land, resources, and data centers and infrastructures to store these “supplies”. There is a larger architectural and urban infrastructural challenge and urgency on how these various kinds of digital exchanges are mediated, to limit the detrimental use of our everyday resources.

Book Description: How can we design the architecture of metabolism? How can architecture redefine resources, produce food, and be eaten away? EDIBLE aims to reveal how architecture constructs, distributes, and leverages power via material recycling, interspecies alliances, biopolitics, and excremental processes. This book presents a collection of writing on architecture, food, and metabolism, exploring an important science-art-architecture complex absent from contemporary considerations of sustainable design. It maps and redraws the affinities of the built environment as a product of many forces, translated in the tensions between products and by-products, production, and consumption and, finally, creation and decomposition.