DeepForest³ reimagines domesticity through microbial architectures. Blurring the boundaries between natural and synthetic environments, the installation envisions a cosy domestic space whose walls and floor are trees and roots, integrating microbial intelligence in a living, permeable architectural ecosystem.
Project Name: DeepForest³
Studio Name: ecoLogicStudio
Location: Milan, Italy
Design Team: Prof Claudia Pasquero and Dr Marco Poletto, Jasper Zehetgruber, Francesca Turi and Alessandra Poletto
Photography: ©Xiao Wang, Synthetic Landscape Lab, Innsbruck University
Drawing from Italy’s history of landscape transformations—from the Navigli canal system in Milano to the drainage of the Pontine Marshes—DeepForest³ juxtaposes the resilience of microbial systems to historical attempts to dominate nature, highlighting both their vitality and the risks of socio-political instrumentalization.
Exclusively for the Triennale di Milano, DeepForest³ re-imagines its predecessor at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Deep.Forest, 2024). The former framed architecture as a synthetic forest, while this new iteration compresses the forest into an intimate domestic scale, envisioning the very idea of home as a living, microbial ecosystem.
“We are now more and more aware that our own nature is cyborgian and collective, and that our own identities extend far beyond the limits of our bodies. We are microbial ecosystems, we are algorithmic networks. It is a necessary consequence that our home becomes an extension of these ecosystems and networks. Our home is our microbiome.” – Prof. Claudia Pasquero.
In DeepForest³, the forest does not surround the dwelling; it becomes itself the dwelling or a place to dwell. The floor is an engraved infrastructure, the walls are a mycelial forest and the air is filtered by photosynthetic organisms that provide nutritious biomass.
