Propagative Structures by Federico Díaz is a speculative architectural project exploring the emergence of complex systems through algorithmic propagation, material agency, and environmental feedback loops. It departs from traditional ideas of authorship and static form, proposing instead an architecture that grows, mutates, and reorganizes itself in response to its surroundings—and crucially, in response to the needs of those who inhabit it, whether human, animal, fungal, microbial, or machinic. This interspecies sensitivity is central to the project’s conceptual core: architecture as a shared medium of life, responsive to diverse forms of agency and desire.
Rooted in Díaz’s long-term interest in post-anthropocentric aesthetics and machinic co-creation, Propagative Structures imagines built environments as evolving organisms—shaped not solely by human intention but also by computational logics, ecological forces, and nonhuman actants. The structures are developed through custom generative algorithms that simulate propagation patterns akin to fungal mycelia or coral reef systems. The result is a dynamic field of forms—intertwining, expanding, dissolving—suggesting both fragility and resilience.
The project’s first iteration is an installation developed for the main exhibition of the Venice Architectural Biennale 2025, curated by Carlo Ratti. Created in close collaboration with Dutch architect Winy Maas, the installation stands adjacent to Biotopia, a film developed by Maas’s team. Díaz’s contribution is robotically fabricated from geopolymer—a low-carbon, mineral-based material—and incorporates organic matter layered across its surface and interior. Mosses, seeds, fungi, and microbial colonies populate the structure, transforming it into a living scaffold that shifts over time.
Rather than offering fixed solutions, Propagative Structures is a provocation—a question of how architecture might behave if it listened, learned, and responded to its entangled context. It proposes a porous, polyphonic architecture, not built over the world, but with it.