Transcripts:A flat screen on the back of the front wall panel is showing a documentary on a loop: BIOSPHERES AND THE RISE OF BOTANICAL CAPITAL The documentary explores three large-scale enclosed complexes, which reproduce fully controlled sections of the natural world: The Eden Project in Cornwall England, the MELiSSA (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative) in Barcelona and the Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona. Text reads: Since Climatron in St. Louis Missouri in the 1960s, large scale interiors housing whole biomes of climatic regions have emerged in recent years reflecting the hubris of late-modern capitalism in the heightened combination of entertainment and ecology within a controlled environment. These closed worlds are not only key sites of engineering and environmental production, but also revive what was previously considered a utopian project in the postwar period, to temper and fabricate the environment as a site of architectural production. Similarly to the botanical worlds of Eden and Biosphere 2, the Masdar Institute in the United Arab Emirates, the Dubai Ski Centre, the New Century Global Centre in Chengdu, China, as well as the integrated casino resorts in Macau, the recent revival of artificial manufactured natures is astonishing to witness and analyse, as a paradoxical response to the global energy crisis and the intensification of detrimental natural events. Biospheres were born under the background of a persistent public belief that catastrophe, due to climate change and insufficient resources, is imminent and thus emulates a new technologically equipped type of “spaceship earth,” or a Noah's ark for the earth's depleting flora. Lydia Kallipoliti and Daniel Ruan Sponsored by the Robert S. Brown’ 52 Faculty Fellowship Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York