Landscape intervention in the Hospital for Covid-19 pandemic in Madrid

From Design with Nature of Ian L. McHarg to The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells of Lynn Margulis, the role of the microorganisms in the cycle of life, health, and disease, and in climate change constitutes the life support system of the biosphere. The micro-parklands of the Emergency Hospital in Madrid create a natural system of prefabricated elements following the aim of rapid implementation, isolation, and protection taking as reference the simple integrated system of living microorganisms. These micro-enclosures provide circular areas where patients, visitors, or healthcare professionals can meet in secret places surrounded by trees and shrubs or long green islands where they can walk around. The landscape architecture project has a surface of 7,434 sqm and occupies a plot of 69,791 sqm located in the Hortaleza district of Madrid. Belonging to the previous City of Justice project on the north side of the Institute of Legal Medicine, the plot, which is trapezoidal with a drop of 4,5 meters, is destined for a public hospital constructed in four months during the Covid-19 pandemic. Due to dry climatic conditions, adapted species with low water demand have been selected reducing the risk of allergies or respiratory problems. The topography has been modified to conserve rainwater and direct it to green areas that act as sponges that reduce runoff, store water, remove sediment and pollutants and release it into other ecosystems. There is no separation between soft scape (planting) and hard scape (soil) in the intervention, both are soft and porous and have macro and micro living beings. Following the references of these books, creativity and destruction as real phenomena both have attributes such as fitness and unfitness in the evolutionary way or health and disease. The vital system of living organisms (creativity) and viruses (destruction) has guided the design and distribution of these external areas that intend to prevent infections in the open air, as part of the mutation and adaptation process.

Afterword

The afterword evaluates the potential ranges of the methodology for reading comparative modernism proposed in The Evolutions of Modernist Epic. Many more epic works than those discussed in detail could be analyzed in relation to the eclipse of Darwinism in the early twentieth century. These include, for instance, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In addition, there are a number of benefits promised by a thorough understanding of biocentric modernism. Hitherto, however, little attention has been paid to the eclipse and its impact on modernism. One reason for this is that for many years the eclipse was regarded as a scientific mistake. The afterword describes how scholars of evolution, including Lynn Margulis, Elizabeth Grosz, and others, have come to reconsider its place in relation to Neo-Darwinism. It is within this larger reconsideration that it is worthwile returning to modernist epic as a source for radical thinking about human and literary evolution.

Paradigms of Protist/Bacteria Symbioses Affecting Human Health: Acanthamoeba species and Trichomonas vaginalis

Ever since the publication of the seminal paper by Lynn Margulis in 1967 proposing the theory of the endosymbiotic origin of organelles, the study of the symbiotic relationships between unicellular eukaryotes and prokaryotes has received ever-growing attention by microbiologists and evolutionists alike. While the evolutionary significance of the endosymbiotic associations within protists has emerged and is intensively studied, the impact of these relationships on human health has been seldom taken into account. Microbial endosymbioses involving human eukaryotic pathogens are not common, and the sexually transmitted obligate parasite Trichomonas vaginalis and the free-living opportunistic pathogen Acanthamoeba represent two unique cases in this regard, to date. The reasons of this peculiarity for T. vaginalis and Acanthamoeba may be due to their lifestyles, characterized by bacteria-rich environments. However, this characteristic does not fully explain the reason why no bacterial endosymbiont has yet been detected in unicellular eukaryotic human pathogens other than in T. vaginalis and Acanthamoeba, albeit sparse and poorly investigated examples of morphological identification of bacteria-like microorganisms associated with Giardia and Entamoeba were reported in the past. In this review article we will present the body of experimental evidences revealing the profound effects of these examples of protist/bacteria symbiosis on the pathogenesis of the microbial species involved, and ultimately their impact on human health.

Gaia Theory: Between Autopoiesis and Sympoiesis

The article discusses the development of the Gaia Hypothesis as it was defined by James Lovelock in the 1970s and later elaborated in his collaboration with biologist Lynn Margulis. Margulis’s research in symbiogenesis and her interest in Maturana and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis helped to reshape the Gaia theory from a first-order systems theory to second-order systems theory. In contrast to the first-order systems theory, which is concerned with the processes of homeostasis, second-order systems incorporate emergence, complexity and contingency. In this respect Latour’s and Stengers’s takes on Gaia, even defining it as an “outlaw” or an anti-system, can be interpreted as specific kind of systems thinking. The article also discusses Haraway’s interpretation of Gaia in terms of sympoiesis and argues that it presents a major reconceptualization of systems theory.