It argues that moving from a current reliance on the non-renewable materials of the geosphere, to the renewable and fundamentally cyclical materials of the biosphere can establish foundations for thinking alternative sustainable building practices.

By positioning architecture and the built environment as a particular case for bio-based materials, where the long lifespans of buildings support carbon storage, this project identifies the bottlenecks that limit their adaptation into the way architecture is thought, designed and built. Architectural design is traditionally understood through the durable and the permanent.

This project aims to challenge this foundation and bring forth the fundamental differences that bio-based materials engender. With focus on the embedded lifespans of living materials, the fundamental circularity and degradability of biomass and resulting transformative life cycles of the artefacts that they embody, this project proposes a holistic conceptualisation of architecture as an organism built out of living materials. 

Timber track develops the first level of the Eco-Metabolistic framework that captures and instrumentalises the material heterogeneity of harvested materials.

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Biopolymer track develops the second level of the Eco-Metabolistic framework that captures and instrumentalises the temporal plasticity of designed bio-based materials while expanding the concept of designed heterogeneous material systems.

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The Bioluminescence Track develops the third level of the Eco-Metabolistic framework that captures and operationalises the living performances of bio-based materials while expanding the concept of temporal plasticity and emergent material heterogeneity of living systems.

Continual construction track sees the creation of the shared demonstrator-testbed associated to the investigations in the three first tracks. It monitors performance and evaluates design criteria of the three material cases through sited environmental change and creates new models of maintenance and intervention by proposing novel practices of participatory continual construction.

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The central concern of the project is to build and evaluate the Eco-Metabolistic framework; to propose a holistic architectural representation enabling new modes of design thinking in a bio-based design paradigm. This core task, aims to identify novel representations for heterogeneity, behaving and living architecture.

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