Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer, scholar, and an Associate Professor directing the MS in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University GSAPP. Prior to Columbia, Kallipoliti was an Associate Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union in New York, where she also served as a Senior Associate at the Institute for Sustainable Design, and as the Feltman Chair in Lighting. She also taught at Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Syracuse University, the University of Technology Sydney and served as a Visiting Fellow at the Canadian Center of Architecture and the University of Queensland in Australia.

Kallipoliti's research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology and environmental politics and more particularly on recycling material experiments, theories of waste and reuse, as well as closed and self-reliant systems and urban environments. Her work is presented in a variety of media including online digital platforms, lexicons, databases and archives, exhibitions and holographic animations, with the scope of engaging a wide audience in what she calls ‘immersive scholarship.’

Kallipoliti is the author of The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit (Lars Muller Publishers, 2018), Histories of Ecological Design; An Unfinished Cyclopedia (Actar Publishers, 2024), the History of Ecological Design for Oxford English Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (2018) and the editor of EcoRedux, a special issue of Architectural Design magazine (AD, 2010). She is also the author of more than fifty articles and research papers published in magazines and books including Log, Architectural Design, Praxis: Journal of Building + Writing, Domus, Volume, ArchPlus, Future Anterior, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Thresholds, 306090, Pidgin, TJE, Architecture in Greece, Buildings and Landscapes, The Journal of Architectural Education and several books.

Her design work has been widely exhibited in the Venice Biennial, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Shenzhen Biennial, the Oslo Architecture Trienalle, the Onassis Cultural Center, the Lisbon Triennale, the Royal Academy of British Architects, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the London Design Museum. It has also been featured and reviewed by Wired, Wallpaper, HBO Max, VICE, ArchDaily, Dezeen, The Atlantic, The Architect’s Newspaper, BBC, La Republica, Domus and many other media outlets. Kallipoliti is the recipient of awards including a silver medal in the W3 international awards for digital innovation in environmental awareness, an honor at the 14th Webby Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, Grants from the Graham Foundation, an Honorable Mention from the Shenzhen Biennale, the Marvin E. Goody award for the creative use of materials, a Fulbright scholarship, various awards for research from the Architect’s Newspaper, the Lawrence Anderson Award for the creative documentation of architectural history, NYSCA grants, the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the High Meadows Sustainability Fund and the ACSA award for creative achievement. Her design and research thinktank ANAcycle was recognized as a Leading Innovator in Sustainable Design in BUILD’s design Awards, Design Educates awards and the World Architecture Festival. In 2022, she was Head Co-Curator (with Areti Markopoulou) of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale with the theme “Edible, Or, The Architecture of Metabolism.”

Kallipoliti holds a Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, a Master of Science [SMArchS] in design and building technology from MIT and a PhD in history and theory of architecture from Princeton University.

ANAcyling [ανα-κύκλωσης] suggests a perpetual orbital movement around disciplinary objects, transforming not only matter and ideas, but also the arrow of time. ANAcyling is an ideational and philosophical system of viewing the world of ideas, information and matter as flow rather than as the accumulation of discrete objects. More than a material system, ANAcyling signals the migration of life through the conversion of one thing to another. This practice represents a body of work where the developmental model of material, conceptual and cultural ANAcyling is considered inherent to design practice.

At present, in a world that has suffered severe loss of natural resources, economic and political instability, architecture can neither be solely directed to the ethics of the world’s salvation nor to an archaic recovery of lost disciplinary tropes. Rather, it needs be upraised as a psycho-spatial or mental position, fueling a reality of change, motion and action. This position differs from utopia in that it does not explicitly seek to be right; it recognizes noise, pollution and waste as generative potential for design. In this sense, ideas that may appear at first sight as science-fictional are not part of a foreign sphere, unassociated with the real, but an extrusion of our own realms and operations.

The Greek word parthenogenesis [παρθενογέννηση] means virgin birth and implies a state of mental excess, where the mind momentarily generates pure ideas, unprecedented and unmixed with anything extant in the physical world. My expanded practice is based conceptually on the counterpart of this notion; it substantiates a design post-praxis - ANAcyling - which emerges as a germinal creative drive, through the desire for transformation of existing information, concepts and physical resources. If we assume that nothing emerges ‘out of zero’, ANAcyling aims to retain and recycle the energy induced in creative systems and exploit the accumulative effect of knowledge and materiality.

Areti Markopoulou

Hayley Eber

Andreas Theodoridis

Youngbin Shin, Alexandros Tsamis, Sonia Ralston, Foivos Geralis, Valeria Ramirez, Didi Rapp, Jestin George, Rhett Russo, Xiaoxiao Zhao, Doosung Shin, Meg Studer, Ezio Blasetti

Design: Siri Lee and Jisung Park

Development: Siri Lee