The debate on sustainability in architecture was in the past years dominated by energy saving and renewable energy production, transportation management, urban densification and other technical solutions. While these solutions address important contemporary issues, they don’t provide a vision on what we mean with a ‘sustainable’ society and what is the future that we expect, or fear.

But some installations at the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale are opening the debate in other directions. Some architects are starting to propose different visions of nature, and of human relationships with the environment.

While the progressive hybridation of human activities with natural ecosystems has made outdated the traditional nature preservation instruments, Ecologic Studio proposes ecoMachines, adaptable mechanisms meant to support a comprehensive urban ecological practice. An ecoMachine, is an adaptable mechanism to manage, transform and assess human actions in their ecosystems. As the Architects claim, this could be a very operative way of being ecologists.

French office Coloco sees the possibility to reuse each piece of neglected land, in order to bring life in them. They propose the term ‘Urbanodiversity’, to describe how urban life dynamics itself evolve, react to external stimuli, and produce unexpected consequences. As they suggest, “nature is not an ideal state, but a relentless force of renewal which operates at any scale”.

Avatar Architettura, through an attractive collage-style installation, envision the edible edifice, a total urban structure providing shelter, food and leisure made free from money and economic exchange.

Ecosistema Urbano doesn’t want to envision utopian futures. On the contrary, they start from practical and empirical facts. In their installation “10 things we learned from the city” they propose adaptive and democratic practices based on processes and participatory techniques, extending the scope of ecological thinking to social, financial, political and cultural domains.