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Symbiotopia
On June 5, 2023, Geneva welcomed a new venue: “La Maison de l’Enfance et de l’Adolescence” (MEA). With this inauguration, a mission was born, that of bringing together all entities of child psychiatry that were previously sporadically scattered throughout the city, into one place. This mission is also a promise to rebuild a strong link between the city and the institution – two back-to-back worlds that the same space invites to look at and love each other. The challenge was, therefore, to create a threshold not only between citizens and the hospital world but also between the real and imaginary worlds.
This is how Symbiotopia was born: a magical universe that borrows from chimerical imaginations. Symbiotopia was first born through the creation of a phantasmagoric bestiary of half-plant, half-animal creatures, frozen in the building’s floors. To do this, the establishment of a work methodology requiring the use of open-source libraries and databases (Biodiversity Heritage Library) was necessary. Indeed, the ex-nihilo production of these 70 creatures would have required temporal and financial resources out of scope. This first approach proves how the free culture of open access is a social wealth to cultivate and develop in businesses.
With the chimeras bringing the space to life, it became evident that life had to be given to them. Then comes the story of Symbiotopia. A hybrid creation taking the form of a booklet staging a children’s tale while being punctuated by invitations to play. The story invites the reader to solve a mystery and restore the lost light on Symbiotopia by following the adventures of the little heroine Tricotine. This 130-page booklet alternating between narration, illustration, riddles was mostly designed and realized thanks to various artificial intelligence tools.
The challenge here was less about resource efficiency than the symbolism between the subject and its materialization. What could be stronger indeed than the principle of the “black box” inherent in Deep Learning and the misunderstanding about the mechanism of generation to speak of the fantastic, misunderstood individuality, specificity, and singularity? A unique and different result then emerges, reflecting the many visitors and residents of the MEA.
This project has demonstrated through its formation not only how architecture can exist outside of its spatiality by being imprinted with experientiality; but also how the emergence of new technologies and work postures can exist and make sense beyond the mere search for efficiency.
