Bioreboot. The Architecture of R&Sie(n)

R&Sie(n)’s investigative approach to architecture focuses on developing technological experiments—cartographic distortions and territorial mutations—to explore the bond between building, context, and human relations. Each building is a process, a dynamic device with the tenacity of a parasite that uses every means offered by architecture to perform an ecologically useful function. In contrast to the polished features of much of today’s architecture, the firm’s projects appear as obstinate, abnormal mechanisms that refuse to dematerialize and are unconcerned about their cumbersome and often disturbing physical appearance. Bioreboot features nineteen projects—illustrated with extensive plans, photographs, and renderings—along with essays and an interview, providing the most comprehensive monograph to date of this elusive, intriguing firm, led by François Roche and Stéphanie Lavaux. Despite working with oppositional relationships: machinery versus nature, purity versus corruption, paranoia versus rationality—theirs is an architecture whose primary aim is the ecological and social improvement of the place in which it exists. Bioreboot is a thought-provoking leap into the future and a clarion call for the development of a new relationship between contemporary architecture and the socionatural world.