The observatory investigates how the short life span and need for constant maintenance of biobased materials can become an opportunity for design and new practices with buildings. The observatory is a radical experiment in a practice of constant renewal and continuous construction. Both the cladding as well as the supporting structure will change and eventually fail. We employ the EMA monitoring framework to track the changes in the elements of the Observatory over an extended period of time. The experiment investigates how detected changes in the building elements can trigger actions of caretaking, repairing and adaptation of structures with biomaterials. We aim to contribute to strategies for lower resource demands, better buildings and a discussion of the role of automation and manual labour in this process.