Phenomenon as Technology

Today, we find ourselves in a moment where new ways of thinking are emerging that open up questions about agency and intelligence within the wider ecology that sustains us. Our work looks at environmental phenomena as a means of supporting life. It examines intelligence both artificial and natural with an emphasis in the non-human. The work takes the position that it may no longer be enough to focus only on sustainability discourses that focus on material choices or net-zero strategies. The challenges we face today point to something larger: the need to prepare for a world that is becoming ever more extreme and unstable. Whether we are talking about environmental, social, or political forces, the issues are planetary in scale. And they call for strategies that go beyond simply correcting past mistakes; they require us to actively prepare for what is to come.

Image: Elemental, Theodore Spyropoulos, AADRL

Theodore Spyropoulos is an architect and educator. He is the Director of the Architectural Association’s world-renowned Design Research Lab (AADRL) in London and a resident artist at Somerset House. He previously chaired the AA Graduate School, and was a Professor of Architecture at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt and a visiting Research Fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He co-founded the experimental art, architecture, and design practice Minimaforms with Stephen Spyropoulos. The work of Minimaforms has been acquired by international art and architecture collections, including the FRAC Centre, the Signum Foundation, and the M+ Archigram Archive. His work has been exhibited at MOMA (NYC), the Barbican Centre, the Onassis Cultural Centre, Somerset House, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology, and the ICA. He previously worked for the offices of Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid. In 2013, the Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture awarded him the ACADIA Award of Excellence for his educational work directing the AADRL. He has been published internationally and is the author of Adaptive Ecologies: Correlated Systems of Living (2013), Enabling (2010), and the forthcoming publications Quantum (2025) and Elemental: Phenomena as Technology (2026).

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