No more ego-spheres An interview with Lydia Kallipoliti on ecological design

A conversation about ecological design with architect, engineer, and scholar Lydia Kallipoliti. Taking her books The Architecture of Closed Worlds (2018) and Histories of Ecological Design (2024) as starting points, we asked Kallipoliti to share her understanding of ecological design and trace the histories of ecological design thinking. In this context, the interview focuses on design projects of the 20th century which sought to create so-called ‘closed worlds’: habitats that could function as closed systems where all material resources are regenerated from recycled waste. In addition to explaining the motivations for these projects, Kallipoliti addresses their practical limitations and the theoretical conclusions we can draw from them. Kallipoliti furthermore reflects on the notions of mediation and scale in design thinking and on the politics of the cycle.