Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, spatial practitioners who together are known as Cooking Sections, taught a master class April 10-12 at Iowa State University and presented a public lecture Wednesday, April 12, in Urbandale at the William Murray Conference Center, which is part of the Living History Farms complex.

According to Fernández Pascual and Schwabe, since the collapse of the housing market in 2008, a number of international investors and CEOs have shifted their activity from real estate into “natural capital,” which is based on different environmental resources ranging from water to geology to non-human species.

“This approach follows the ‘No Net Loss’ policy, whereby the net amount of biodiversity remains theoretically constant,” they said. “Mitigation banking reconfigures the ways we extract and preserve the value of endangered species and their habitats. But what does ‘no net loss’ mean within a context of climate change, impossible quantification of nature and human-induced geological transformations?”

Part of the ISU Department of Architecture 2016-2017 Public Program Series, this lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Architecture, College of Design, Department of Art and Visual Culture, Department of Community and Regional Planning and graduate program in urban design. It is free and open to the public.