Metabolic Infrastructures: An Organic Analogy between Literal Imitation and Metaphor

Abstract

Throughout history, nature and organisms have served as analogies for both design and the contemplation of architecture and cities. In this paper, the concept of metabolism as an organic analogy in architecture and the built environment is discussed by juxtaposing the two approaches. Literal imitation seen in interdisciplinary studies of urban metabolism offers a new applicative perspective for sustainable cities. On the other hand, the historical reference of Japanese Metabolism, from the 1960s, offers a relevant metaphoric example with an added poetic humanist spirit. Regarded through an infrastructure prism, the organic analogy of metabolism is discussed by employing themes of the relationship between organisms and environment, the correlation between organs, the relationship between form and function, and the principle of vitality. Furthermore, the concept of metabolic infrastructure is presented as a way of bridging the literal and metaphorical approach and as a possible tool to mitigate the metabolic rift.

Keywords:

• Function
• Japanese Metabolism
• infrastructure
• organic analogy
• urban metabolism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Numerous examples include, for instance, Leon Battista Alberti’s Renaissance theory of concinnitas (the comprehensive harmonic relations in a work of architecture), which is deemed a famous application of the neo-Platonic philosophers’ concept of beauty in art that must follow the principles derived from the structure of the natural world. In discussing the origin of architecture, Marc-Antoine Laugier’s primitive hut dwells on reasoning of the principles rooted in nature, which authorise architectural simplicity. Goethe has moved the discourse to the recognition of the artificial, the “second nature,” according to which, art (and architecture) follows the method of nature. The latter served for the development of further theories by Gottfried Semper, who dissociated architecture and nature; after the modernist rejection of the relation between nature and architecture, the environmental movement in the twentieth century established nature as an important concept to think architecture within cyclical processes and ecosystem. Similarly, cities have been regarded as organisms by Mumford, while organic and biological analogies, metaphors and similes are used in various contemporary urban studies as important elements in considering cities as ecosystems. And so on. See, for example, Philip Steadman, The Evolution of Designs: Biological Analogy in Architecture and the Applied Arts, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2008; orig. 1979); Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013); Mari Hvattum, “‘Unfolding from within’: Modern Architecture and the Dream of Organic Totality,” Journal of Architecture 11, no. 4 (2006): 497–509; Claire L. Narraway, Oliver Davis, Sally Lowell, Katrina Lythgoe, Scott J. Turner, and Stephen Marshall, “Biotic Analogies for Self-Organising Cities,” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 47, no. 2 (2020): 268–86.

2 Ute Poerschke positions the concept of function in contemporary environmental cyclical thinking: “The concept of function as the effect of parts within wholes is essential when thinking of cycles.” Ute Poerschke, Architectural Theory of Modernism: Relating Functions and Forms (New York: Routledge, 2016), 203.

3 Peter Collins shows that French Rationalists (including Viollet-le-Duc) were more interested in the structural analogy (the purposes of the parts of the construction in relation to each other and to the whole) and that Louis Sullivan, who followed the Romantics’ organic theory of form, can be credited as the first who “made biological analogies the foundation of a total architectural doctrine.” Peter Collins, “The Biological Analogy,” in Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory, ed. William W. Braham and Jonathan A. Hale (London: Routledge, 1959), 135. With Gottfried Semper, Karl Bötticher, William Morris, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, among others, the organic analogy went through many reasonings and interpretations and played a prominent role also in the discourse of function and functionalism in architecture. See Edward Robert De Zurko, Origins of Functionalist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957); Forty, Words and Buildings, 174–95; Poerschke, Architectural Theory of Modernism, 61–103.

4 William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (London: Vintage, 2009).

5 Ute Poerschke concludes that the architecture of environmental movements does not appeal to the themes of aesthetic expression and representation, since its scope of interest remains within environmental responsibility as well as technical and economic tasks. Nevertheless, she suggests that we search for examples in the history of architecture in which interpretations of nature and technology resulted in architectural-artistic statements. Poerschke, Architectural Theory of Modernism, 203–207.

6 See William McDonough & Partners, The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability (Charlottesville, VA: William McDonough & Partners, 1992). Nevertheless, the ambition evident in Pallasmaa’s article was to move beyond the division between utility and metaphorical expression. Juhani Pallasmaa, “From Metaphorical to Ecological Functionalism,” Architectural Review 193 (1993): 74–79.

7 Compare Louis H. Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott’s, March 23, 1896, 403–409; McDonough and Braungart, Cradle to Cradle, 141–44.

8 Jan Minx, Felix Creutzig, Verena Medinger, Tina Ziegler, Anne Owen, and Giovanni Baiocchi, Developing a Pragmatic Approach to Assess Urban Metabolism in Europe: A Report to the European Environment Agency prepared by Technische  Universität  Berlin and Stockholm Environment Institu, Climatekon Working Paper 01/2011 (Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin, 2011); Sybil Derrible, Lynette Cheah, Mohit Arora, and Lih Wei Yeow, “Urban Metabolism,” in Urban Informatics, ed. Wenzhong Shi, Michael F. Goodchild, Michael Batty, Mei-Po Kwan, and Anshu Zhang (Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2021), 85–114.

9 Cynthia C. Davidson, ed., Anyhow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 94. Concurrently Stan Allen argues that before the rise of disciplinary specialisation, architects had long dealt with diverse infrastructural matters. Stan Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” in Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 52.

10 See Infranet Lab/Lateral Office—Neeraj Bhatia, Maya Przybylski, Lola Sheppard, and Mason White, eds., Coupling: Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism, Pamphlet Architecture, vol. 30 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010).

11 The term “infrastructure” refers to a wide range of programmes or community services and includes public utilities, transportation, and energy. It further denotes other (public) programmes such as education, health care, science, sports, social care, culture, and housing. See Kelly Shannon and Marcel Smets, The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2010); Peter Šenk, “Infrastruktura/Arhitektura,” Architect’s Bulletin 223 (2020): 20–23.

12 The concept of metabolic rift has been epitomised from Karl Marx by John Bellamy Foster in order to “capture the material estrangement of human beings in capitalist society from the natural conditions of their existence. To argue that large-scale capitalist agriculture created such a metabolic rift between human beings and the soil was to argue that basic conditions of sustainability had been violated.” John Bellamy Foster, “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (1999), 383.

13 See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). Both Castells’s discussion of the “space of flows” from the urban sociology perspective and Bratton’s conceptualisation of the six-layered Stack, which encompasses the correlation of the global-scale computing within our material existence, are theoretical works. In contrast, contemporary urban metabolism studies focus predominantly on technical (quantitative) research of material, energy, and substance flows, as presented further in this paper.

14 Sabine Barles, “Society, Energy and Materials: The Contribution of Urban Metabolism Studies to Sustainable Urban Development Issues,” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 53, no. 4 (2010): 439–55; Maŕa Yetano Roche, Stefan Lechtenböhmer, Manfred Fischedick, Marie-Christine Gröne, Chun Xia, and Carmen Dienst, “Concepts and Methodologies for Measuring the Sustainability of Cities,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 39 (2014): 519–47.

15 Erik Swyngedouw, “The Making of Cyborg Cities,” in In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, ed. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw (London: Routledge, 2005), 23.

16 Barles, “Society, Energy and Materials,” 441.

17 Lydia Kallipoliti, “Closed Worlds: The Rise and Fall of Dirty Physiology,” Architectural Theory Review 20, no. 1 (2015): 67–90.

18 Christopher Kennedy, John Cuddihy, and Joshua Engel-Yan, “The Changing Metabolism of Cities,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 11, no. 2 (2007): 43–59; Barles, “Society, Energy and Materials,” 441–42.

19 Abel Wolman, “The Metabolism of Cities,” Scientific American 213, no. 3 (1965): 178–93.

20 See Lin Lin, Min Liu, Feixiong Luo, Kai Wang, Qiuzhuo Zhang, and Wei-Ning Xiang, “Comment on ‘The Study of Urban Metabolism and its Applications to Urban Planning and Design,’ by Kennedy, et al. (2011),” Environmental Pollution 167 (2012): 184–85.

21 According to Marx, the capitalist agriculture “disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e. it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural condition for the lasting fertility of the soil.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 637. See also Brett Clark and John Bellamy Foster “The Dialectic of Social and Ecological Metabolism: Marx, Mészáros, and the Absolute Limits of Capital,” Socialism and Democracy 24, no. 2 (2010): 124–38; Jakob Lederer and Ulrich Kral, “Theodor Weyl: A Pioneer of Urban Metabolism Studies,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 19, no. 5 (2015): 695–702.

22 Kennedy, Cuddihy, and Engel-Yan, “The Changing Metabolism of Cities,” 44.

23 See Barles, “Society, Energy and Materials,” 439–55; Christopher Kennedy, Stephanie Pincetl, and Paul Bunje, “The Study of Urban Metabolism and Its Applications to Urban Planning and Design,” Environmental Pollution 159, nos. 8–9 (2011): 1965–73; Lin, et al., “Comment on ‘The Study of Urban Metabolism’,” 184–85; Josephine Kaviti Musango, Paul Currie, and Blake Robinson, Urban Metabolism for Resource-Efficient Cities (Paris: UN Environment, 2017), 1–40; Martin Dijst, Ernst Worrell, Lars Böcker, Paul Brunner, Simin Davoudi, Stan Geertman, Robert Harmsen, Marco Helbich, Albert A. M. Holtslag, Mei-Po Kwan, Barbara Lenz, Glenn Lyons, Patricia L. Mokhtarian, Peter Newman, Adriaan Perrels, Ana Poças Ribeiro, Jesus Rosales Carreón, Giles Thomson, and Marianne Zeyringer, “Exploring Urban Metabolism: Towards an Interdisciplinary Perspective,” Resources, Conservation and Recycling 132 (2018): 190–203; Marina Fischer-Kowalski, “On the History of Industrial Metabolism,” in Perspectives on Industrial Ecology, ed. Dominique Bourg, Suren Erkman, and Jacques Chirac (London: Routledge, 2003), 35–45.

24 Swyngedouw, “The Making of Cyborg Cities,” 21–40.

25 Daniel Ibañez and Nikos Katsikis, eds., New Geographies 06: Grounding Metabolism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2014). In terms of the wider scope of discussions on metabolism, there is also a contextualisation entitled “On Metabolism and Metabolists” presented by Ken Tadashi Oshima in the interview with the editors. Ken Tadashi Oshima in conversation with Daniel Ibañez and Nikos Katsikis, “On Metabolism and the Metabolists,” in New Geographies 06, 98–107.

26 Marina Fischer-Kowalski, “On the History of Industrial Metabolism,” 35–45; Gaspare D’Amico, Raffaella Taddeo, Lei Shi, Tan Yigitcanlar, and Giuseppe Ioppolo, “Ecological Indicators of Smart Urban Metabolism: A Review of the Literature on International Standards,” Ecological Indicators 118 (2020); Massimo Palme and Agnese Salvati, “Sustainability and Urban Metabolism,” Sustainability (Switzerland) 12, no. 1 (2020): 1–3.

27 The Japanese Metabolists comprised the architects Kiyonori Kikutake, Fumihiko Maki, Masato Ōtaka, and Noriaki (Kisho) Kurokawa, the critic Noboru Kawazoe, and designer Kiyoshi Awazu first presented their Metabolism 1960 manifesto at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo. See Noboru Kawazoe, Kiyonori Kikutake, Masato Ohtaka, Fumihiko Maki, and Noriaki Kurokawa, Metabolism 1960: The Proposals for New Urbanism (Tokyo: Bijutu Syuppan Sha, 1960). They used biological metaphors related to their name: organic growth and decay, the city as the human body, its blood circulation, etc. See a recent reflection on the lessons of Metabolism: Raffaele Pernice, ed., The Urbanism of Metabolism: Visions, Scenarios and Models for the Mutant City of Tomorrow (London: Routledge, 2022). In 2011 there was a comprehensive retrospective of Metabolism displayed at the Mori Art Museum in 2011. Curated by Hajime Yatsuka, et al. and entitled Metabolism: The City of the Future; Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present Day Japan, it was made up of four sections: Birth of Metabolism, Era of Metabolism, From Space to Environment and Global Metabolism. See: https://www.mori.art.museum/english/contents/metabolism/info/index.html

28 Vanesa Castán Broto, Adriana Allen, and Elizabeth Rapoport, “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Metabolism,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 16, no. 6 (2012): 853; Dijst, et al., “Exploring Urban Metabolism,” 192.

29 Alison Margaret Smithson, ed., Team 10 Primer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974).

30 This translation of the term in Japanese, shinchin taisha, stands for the notion of continuous growth and renewal. Zhongjie Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan (London: Routledge, 2010). Furthermore, the term is closely related to Buddhist concepts of transmogrification and reincarnation. See Cherie Wendelken, “Putting Metabolism Back in Place,” in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architecture Culture, ed. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Lagault (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 279–99.

31 Kisho Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture (London: Studio Vista, 1977); Meike Schalk, “The Architecture of Metabolism: Inventing a Culture of Resilience,” Arts 3, no. 2 (2014): 279–97.

32 Noboru Kawazoe, Contemporary Japanese Architecture (Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, 1968), 35. In the context of understanding the philosophy of the Metabolist work, Kurokawa also mentioned the need to provide 1.6 million dwellings annually with minimum costs, which became a pressing social issue. Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 28.

33 See Raffaele Pernice, “The Issue of Tokyo Bay's Reclaimed Lands as the Origin of Urban Utopias in Modern Japanese Architecture,” Journal of Architecture and Planning (Transactions of AIJ) 72, no. 613 (2007): 259–66; Raffaele Pernice, “Metabolism Reconsidered: Its Role in the Architectural Context of the World,” Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering 3, no. 2 (November 2004): 357–63; Raffaele Pernice, “The Transformation of Tokyo During the 1950s and Early 1960s: Projects Between Planning and Urban Utopia,” Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering 5, no. 2 (November 2006): 253–60; Robin Boyd, New Directions in Japanese Architecture (London: Studio Vista, 1968); Zhongjie Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).

34 Hajime Yatsuka, “Architecture in the Urban Desert: A Critical Introduction to Japanese Architecture after Modernism,” in Oppositions Reader: Selected Readings from a Journal for Ideas and Criticism in Architecture, 1973–1984, ed. K. Michael Hays (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 255–87. The article was originally published in Oppositions 23 (1981).

35 Kiyonori Kikutake, “New Form and Old Tradition,” in Kiyonori Kikutake: Between Land and the Sea, ed. Ken Tadashi Oshima (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), 108–15; Zhongjie Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement, 56.

36 The concept of the artificial land can be traced in modern architecture at least since Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus for Aligiers in the 1930s. The phrase was coined by Takamasa Yoshizaka in mid 1950s. See Rem Koolhaas and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, eds., Project Japan: Metabolism Talks (Cologne: Taschen, 2011), 96. The word capsule derives from the Latin capsula, meaning “a small case or box,” but the concept of the capsule can be found especially in the fields of engineering, space engineering and natural sciences, namely, in pharmacology, anatomy and medicine, microbiology, botany and biology. It has been used in architecture discourse predominantly from the 1960s to designate a minimum, sealed-off, compact, mobile, ergonomically furnished living or functional unit with limited durability. Peter Šenk, Capsules: Typology of Other Architecture (London: Routledge, 2018).

37 Peter Šenk, “The Infrastructure of Care: Metabolist Architecture as a Social Catalyst,” in The Urbanism of Metabolism, ed. Pernice, 73–83.

38 The design characteristics of a capsule generally define it as a round, oval or cylindrical small crate or container, but the design interpretations in architecture have been primarily related to their operativity and the formal properties seemed not to be exclusively demanded nor binding. Šenk, Capsules, 11–113.

39 Kisho Kurokawa, “Oh! Saibogu No Okite” (‘Oh! The Code of the Cyborg’),” SD—Space Design 3 (1969): 50–53; Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 75–85.

40 A description of the origin of Kikutake and his family is also provided in Kiyonori Kikutake and Maurizio Vitta, Kiyonori Kikutake: From Tradition to Utopia (Milan: l’Arca Edizioni, 1997), 9–15; Koolhaas and Obrist, eds., Project Japan, 133. Kikutake presented the origin of his family and also emphasised its social mission in the interview, stating: “Purpose of doing architecture, for me, must not be for architecture itself. It must serve the people in their region.” Kiyonori Kikutake, interview by the author, Tokyo, June 18, 2009. Audio transcription and authorised text, author’s archive. See also Šenk, “The Infrastructure of Care,” 75–80.

41 Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Form (Washington: Washington University, 1964), 19.

42 Fumihiko Maki and Masato Ōtaka, “Toward Group Form,” in Metabolism 1960: The Proposals for New Urbanism, ed. Noboru Kawazoe, et al. (Tokyo: Bijutu Syuppan Sha, 1960), 58.

43 Kisho Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 101.

44 Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 101.

45 See, too, Yuriko Furuhata, “Spaceship Earth: Metabolist Capsules, the Petro-Economy, and Geoengineering,” in The Urbanism of Metabolism, ed. Pernice, 173–83.

46 Collins, “The Biological Analogy,” 134.

47 Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” 49–54.

48 The term Metabolic Infrastructures has been used in an art context by Clémentine Deliss, who emphasised the need for curators to be sensitive to the transformation and ways of repurposing museums for multidisciplinary, performative, decolonial, and democratic models of art practice, research, and education. Clémentine Deliss, “Curating Metabolic Infrastructures,” 2021, https://kuratorischepraxisundkunstvermittlung.blog.uni-hildesheim.de/2021/05/03/curating-metabolic-infrastructures/

49 Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” 54.

50 In “Linkage in Collective Form,” written by Maki in collaboration with Jerry Goldberg, they analyse five basic linking operations: to mediate, to define, to repeat, to make a sequential path, and to select. Maki, Investigations in Collective Form, 25–51.

51 Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 181.

52 Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” 57.

53 Kiyonori Kikutake, “Ocean City,” in Metabolism 1960, ed. Kawazoe, et al., 17–19; Günther Nitschke, “The Metabolists of Japan,” Architectural Design (October 1964): 509–24.

54 Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 140.

55 Kisho Kurokawa, The Philosophy of Symbiosis (London: Academy Editions, 1994).

56 See Furuhata, “Spaceship Earth," 173–83.

57 See Fischer-Kowalski, “On the History of Industrial Metabolism,” 45; Broto, Allen, and Rapoport, “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Urban Metabolism,” 858–89; Dijst, et al., “Exploring Urban Metabolism,” 201.

58 Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” 55.

59 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

60 Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” 55.

61 See, for example, Forty, Words and Buildings, 174–95; Poerschke, Architectural Theory of Modernism.

62 Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” 57.

63 Fumihiko Maki, Investigations in Collective Form (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Press, 1964), 22.

64 Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” 55.

65 Kikutake, “New Form and Old Tradition,” 108.

66 Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 34. The reliance upon untreated, raw materials as a basis and the characteristic feature of the Japanese architecture has been exposed also by Kikutake. Kikutake, “New Form and Old Tradition.”

67 Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” 52.

68 Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” 57.

69 Allen, “Infrastructural Urbanism,” 55.

70 Kikutake, “New Form and Old Tradition,” 108–12.

71 Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 84–85; “GK: The Proprieties of this Flawlessly Composed Organism” (“GK: Kono Ten-i-muhou na Kotai no Sahou”), SD—Space Design 3 (1969): 54–55.

72 See Maki, Investigations in Collective Form, 9; Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 79.

73 Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 105.

74 See Šenk, “The Infrastructure of Care,” 74. Joan Fisher and Berenice Tronto suggest that “caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fisher, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring,” in Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, ed. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990), 40; Elke Krasny, “Architecture and Care,” in Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, ed. Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 33–41.

75 See Krasny, “Architecture and Care,” 36–41.

76 Kurokawa, Metabolism in Architecture, 85.

77 Peter Dickens, “Marx and the Metabolism between Humanity and Nature,” Alethia 3, no. 2 (2000): 40–45.

78 Kawazoe, et al., Metabolism 1960, 6.

79 Collins, “The Biological Analogy,” 137.

80 Steadman, The Evolution of Designs, 8–20; Barie Fez-Barringten, “An Architectural History of Metaphors,” AI and Society 26, no. 1 (2010): 103–11.

81 See Koolhaas and Obrist, eds., Project Japan, front and rear covers.

82 Noboru Kawazoe, “Material and Man,” in Metabolism 1960, Kawazoe, et al., 51.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter Šenk

Peter Šenk is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture and Spatial Planning at the University of Maribor, Slovenia. He is a co-founder of the architecture office Studio Stratum, IPoP—Institute for Spatial Policies, and the House of Architecture Maribor. His research interests include architectural and urban theory, and the theory of visual culture. He is the editor of City-Edge (Pivec, 2014) and Funkcija v arhitekturi (Function in Architecture, ZRC, 2020), and is the author of Capsules: Typology of Other Architecture (ZRC, 2015; Routledge, 2018).