Aditya Mandlik explores water, worms, and bees in design

Mumbai-based architect Aditya Mandlik has published a guest essay exploring how ecological gradients and non-human intelligence can transform design, shifting architecture from controlling nature to collaborating with it. This framework challenges the traditional human-centric organization of the built environment, which Rosi Braidotti critiques as the humanist figure that treats the human as the measure of all things.

The traditional approach has resulted in a progressively sanitized world where microbes, insects, weeds, and damp are excluded in the name of hygiene and control. Moving beyond this paradigm requires a pedagogical and philosophical reorientation of the discipline itself, transitioning the architect's role from a sole author to a curator of multispecies encounters and natural intelligences.

Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event

The core framework utilized is the gradient: stepped values between two absolutes within a given behavior domain, comparable to computer binary codes of ones and zeros. By overlapping different gradients, such as soil type with moisture or light, differentiated conditions emerge that favor various species and non-human actors. This echoes Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the Umwelt, where organisms perceive and act within their own worlds at their own scales.

Mandlik explored this curatorial approach in Factory 5.0, a pavilion featuring thousands of kingworms housed within transparent acrylic enclosures. The project investigated the material agency of non-human organisms as the kingworms gnawed, perforated, and consumed polystyrene foam. This altered the material's surface and mass at a pace that the architect could curate and anticipate, but never entirely control, moving fabrication toward a continuum of consumption and decomposition.