Dean's Lecture Series: Bio_lent Machines

How can we undo the violence that has been wrought on our planet due to urbanisation, inequality and global warming? In our first Dean’s Lecture for 2025, international guests Claudio Rossi and Daniela Atencio discuss how machines can work with the natural environment to create alternative methods of caring for and restoring the land. Focusing on contemporary Latin America, Rossi and Atencio use the landscape's complexity as a testing ground for looking at architecture as Bio_lent Machines – or machines that build machines. This new way of thinking about architecture frames the design practice as a machine that uses technology to reverse the various forms of destruction inflicted on our world.