This lecture offers five short pills of architecture (Hashima Island, Caddisfly Shelters, Opposing Neighborhoods, Exchange of doors and windows, Phenotypic Plasticity) which narrate a phenomenon or explain a concept which has been important in our architectural, academic and professional practice. It’s titled ‘Connections. Five Architectural Pills’. They are all independent, but are connected in our speech; and try to work as an analgesic, stimulant or vitamin for our thoughts around the eco-social phenomenon that makes architecture. The speech moves through different topics, connecting the transformation of the island of Hashima in to a mini-city dedicated to coal extraction, with temporary shelters built by caddisflies during their larval phase using little mineral and organic fragments. It connects the concept of phenotypic plasticity in biology with the hillside construction of two opposed neighborhoods in the city of Medellin. And it allows the description of reusing architectural fragments of demolished constructions to coexist in the same text as the tempting idea of thinking of architecture like an extended phenotype of the human body, like a big prosthesis that synthesizes specific ecosystems with genetic and behavioral necessities.
 
 
Plan:b was founded in 2001 and works from Medellin, Colombia. The Colombian architects Felipe and Federico Mesa currently lead it. Plan: B understands material practices as ecosocial areas of convergence and as partial agreements with potential to transform our environments. Felipe Mesa (1975) is an architect from the Universidad Pontifi cia Bolivariana (UPB), Medellin (1998) and has a Master degree from ETSAB in Barcelona, Spain (2000).