As part of “The Beauty of Longevity” initiative by L’Oréal Paris, the pioneering biodesign firm ecoLogicStudio, founded in London by Prof. Claudia Pasquero and Dr. Marco Poletto, in collaboration with the Synthetic Landscape Lab at Innsbruck University, unveils Poly.Derma — a living sculpture that reimagines the interface between skin, space, and biotechnology.
Project Name: Poly.Derma
Studio Name: ecoLogicStudio
Location: Paris
Poly.Derma embodies a post-anthropocentric phenomenology, where the sculpture’s skin is not just metaphorically “home” or “body,” but literally a living, responsive surface: breathing, sensing, and evolving.
Acting as both organism and architecture, it invites sensory intimacy, microbial entanglement, and a rethinking of skin as interface.
Its outer 3d printed surface, crafted from a biodegradable biopolymer, evokes both architectural envelope and human dermis: it is not merely a boundary; it’s a sensing, porous membrane, offering a tangible experience of impermanence and transformation through its ability to degrade and respond to environmental stimuli.
At its heart, the installation contains a transparent glass core that sustains a culture of red algae—microorganisms that naturally produce astaxanthin, a powerful antioxidant found within the human body. This internal life-system functions like a metabolic organ; it mirrors our internal chemistry, evoking a symbiotic entanglement between human and microbial life, challenging where the body ends, and its environment begins.
Rather than a discrete sculpture, Poly.Derma is a spatial condition—its sinuous, folded morphology collapsing inside and outside, surface and volume, into one continuous and immersive environment. It invites a new kind of intimacy, one that entangles the visitor in a sensory and biochemical exchange with the more-than-human world.
With Poly.Derma, ecoLogicStudio and the Synthetic Landscape Lab extend their exploration of the blurred boundaries between human and non-human systems, architecture and biology, matter and metabolism. What emerges is a reconsideration of the built space, evolving from its original function of shelter into an evolving inhabitable body.
In a time that demands resilience, adaptability, and interdependence, Poly.Derma offers a vision of architecture as an organism, soft and sentient, expressing a future that values beauty as a measure of ecological intelligence.
