How can we design the architecture of metabolism? How can architecture redefine resources, produce food, and be eaten away? EDIBLE aims to reveal how architecture constructs, distributes, and leverages power via material recycling, interspecies alliances, biopolitics, and excremental processes. This book presents a collection of writing on architecture, food, and metabolism, exploring an important science-art-architecture complex absent from contemporary considerations of sustainable design. It maps and redraws the affinities of the built environment as a product of many forces, translated in the tensions between products and by-products, production, and consumption and, finally, creation and decomposition.

Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer, and scholar, and holds a PhD from Princeton University and a master’s of science in architecture studies (SMArch) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is an associate professor at the Cooper Union in New York. Previously she taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she directed the MSArch program, Syracuse University, and Columbia University. Kallipoliti is the author of The Architecture of Closed Worlds (Lars Muller, 2018), the History of Ecological Design for Oxford English Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (2018) and the editor of EcoRedux (Architectural Design, 2011). Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennial, the London Design Museum, the Oslo Trienalle, the Lisbon Triennale, the Shenzhen Biennale and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, among other venues. She is the recipient of awards including the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) award for creative achievement, the Architect’s Newspaper, a Webby Award, and a grant from New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). Kallipoliti was cocurator of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2022.

Areti Markopoulou is a PhD architect, researcher, and urban technologist working at the intersection between architecture and digital technologies. She is the academic director at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) in Barcelona where she also leads the Advanced Architecture Research Group. Her research and practice focus on redefining the architecture of cities through an ecological and technological spectrum combining design with new materials, digital fabrication and big data. She is coeditor at Urban Next, a global network focused on rethinking architecture through the contemporary urban milieu and has been consulting and developing urban and research projects on topics including urban regeneration through data science (Leading Cities), guidelines for urban technologies in public space (Barcelona City Council), circular design and construction (Digital Matter) and multidisciplinary educational models in the digital age (IAAC, SISD, UNIGE).  Markopoulou is the editor and co-author of Learning Cities (Actar, 2022), Edible (TAB, 2022), Black Ecologies (Actar, 2019) and Disrupting through Circular Design (IAAC, 2019). She chairs the Responsive Cities International Symposium that she cofounded in Barcelona in 2016 and she has served as head curator of international exhibitions such as Edible (TAB 2022); Future Arena & On Site Robotics (Building Barcelona Construmat 2017–19); Print Matter (In3dustry 2016); HyperCity (Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale, 2015); BB MAKE (Beijing Design Week, 2014); and MyVeryOwnCity (World Bank, BR Barcelona, 2011). Markopoulou was appointed head co-curator of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2022.