Archinect - News

German researchers discover carbon sequestering concrete additive made from cyanobacteria

2024-07-29T19:37:00-04:00

Researchers from Germany's Fraunhofer Institute have discovered a new bioconcrete solution made using cyanobacteria (formerly known as blue-green algae) that sequesters carbon through a process of photosynthesis. Their work for the “BioCarboBeton” project examined the potential of stromatolites to be used as an additive in traditional concrete mixtures, finding success after mimicking their natural binding processes by using a new technological method.

The project, which aims to scale up production for commercial uses, also found potential applications in insulation material, brick, formwork filling, and even mortar.

Take a look also at similar SOM and Drexel University-led material research for concrete and concrete alternatives that we published in the past year.

Henning Larsen debuts Open Detail, a digital biomaterials resource for architects

2024-03-21T18:34:00-04:00

Henning Larsen has unveiled a new tool for designers that allows them access to a database of biogenic materials examples taken from around the world.

The firm debuted its new Open Detail resource at the AEC Hackathon in Copenhagen. Together with collaborators Copenhagen School of Design and Technology (KEA), Ramboll, Speckle, and Chevrant, the entry took home first place for the 'Best Mashup Project' at the Hackathon.

Now, their aim is to "foster a shift towards low-carbon architecture" by making such "tangible" biogenic design solutions more easily accessible to the public and practitioners as an open-source repository and knowledge-sharing platform.

The searchable Open Detail will allow users to contribute and download material details in either 2D or 3D format once actualized. Henning Larsen says this is "only the beginning" for Open Detail, adding that the project's off...

Researchers use cellulose and algae to create 3D printed architectural material

2024-02-09T13:46:00-05:00

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have published their study into how materials made from nanocellulose and algae can be used as sustainable architectural materials. The research, conducted in collaboration with the Wallenberg Wood Science Center, “shows how the abundant sustainable material can be 3D printed into a wide array of architectural components, using much less energy than conventional construction methods,” according to the team.

Nanocellulose, molecules consisting of hundreds or thousands of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms, are already used in biomedicine to 3D print scaffolds for tissue and cell growth but have never been used in an architectural material. The researchers, therefore, mixed nanocellulose fibers and water with an algae-based material called alginate to produce a 3D printable material with architectural uses in mind.

“For the first time...

Better green materials are still needed to trigger a revolution in the building sector, experts say

2023-12-14T13:56:00-05:00

Repeated calls for the decarbonization of architecture are sometimes met with criticisms as to their lack of substance, and in some cases, practicality or overall feasibility, Canada's National Observer tells us.

The only mycelium binders on the market are, for example, unsuitable to certain weather conditions, according to Yale Center for Ecosystems and Architecture’s Mae-ling Lokko. Other products like composite wood materials can contain formaldehyde, which puts a damper on the new heights mass timber designs are reaching in Europe and North America. The current limitations of bio-concrete, hemp, and algae materials are also well-known.

To enact a truly revolutionary turn, both additional investments into developing new alternative products and a better understanding of a building’s end-of-life recyclability are needed, Lokko and Naomi Keena of McGill University's School of Architecture told the paper.

Canada and its vast reserves of agricultural waste derived from applicable c...

SOM unveils new algae-based Bio-Blocks technology at the Chicago Architecture Biennial

2023-09-29T14:01:00-04:00

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) has debuted a new concrete alternative material as part of its participation in the fifth Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB 5), which is taking place now through February 11th at multiple locations citywide.

The firm’s Bio-Blocks technology is being presented as a replacement for traditional Concrete Masonry Units (or CMUs) and can reduce emissions on a project by up to 8% if used at scale. The blocks were fabricated with help from Prometheus Materials using microalgae that were then subject to the company’s patent-pending photosynthetic biocementation process. The results seen therein offer a one-metric-ton total offset, according to the product team.

Image © Dave Burk | Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)

Displayed in a spiral construction courtesy of the International Masonry Institute and J&E Duff, Inc., in The Mews space at their 167 Green development in the city’s Fulton Market District, the product demonstrates its future potential as a building...

A Japanese teahouse prototype made from food waste debuts at this year’s Venice Biennale

2023-05-08T13:18:00-04:00

Japanese architecture and engineering firm Mitsubishi Jisho Design has unveiled details of a sustainable teahouse project at the upcoming Venice Architecture Biennale, which takes place from May 20th to November 26th in what is now its 18th edition.

The Veneti-An Tea House prototype is included in the European Cultural Center’s Time Space Existence exhibition, which runs parallel to the fair in the city's Giardini Marinaressa Gardens. According to its designers, the scheme is meant as a place of “renewed connection.” Its structure is composed of food waste products, adding to the intended exploration of themes of environmental protection and sustainable design.

Image courtesy Mitsubishi Jisho Design

The components are culled from local coffee grounds and pasta (common waste products in Italy, according to the designers) made using Fabula Food Concrete, a University of Tokyo-born Japanese product that entered the market only recently and offers architects the chance to build using a m...

MVRDV reveals 'ecology-first' master plan for health and technology campus

2023-04-18T08:00:00-04:00

MVRDV has designed what the firm describes as a “pointillist” master plan for a health and technology campus in the Dutch city of Nijmegen.

The project aims to reimagine the Noviotech Campus by unifying the currently disjointed campus buildings and adding new buildings in the empty spaces between them while merging the site into the surrounding city. The design team says it's taking an “ecology-first” approach by transforming the campus into a nature-inclusive landscape that connects the neighboring Goffertpark, one of the city’s largest green spaces, and the adjacent Jonkerbos War Cemetery to designated green corridors nearby.

Image © MVRDV

The master plan preserves six of the seven pre-existing large buildings on the site, including one that will be renovated. The buildings will serve as a grid into which new buildings are added over time over three phases of development. The campus aims to eventually expand to approximately three million square feet of leasable space.

A green sp...

400 hanging mushroom bricks used in Studio Link-Arc’s Shenzhen Biennale installation

2023-03-22T11:27:00-04:00

New York City firm Studio Link-Arc has created an installation in Shenzhen formed from 400 hanging mushroom bricks. Titled 'Mushroom Brick Pyramids,' the project was created for the 2022 Shenzhen Biennale, which adopted the theme ‘More than Human Adventure.’

Photo credit: Yu Bai

Seeking to respond to the theme with a project that explored “the intersection between living organisms and architecture,” the studio chose mycelia as their working material due to its ability to survive and adapt to varying environments. As a result, the installation aimed to reflect, visualize, and learn from the organisms in order to inform future architectural applications of the material.

Photo credit: Yu Bai

The resulting scheme was set within a converted old brewery, which included a gallery space between the continuous concrete frames. Beneath the 400 hanging mushroom bricks, a pool was created to provide a moist microclimate, while the indoor-outdoor nature of the space allowed for additional moisture...

Henning Larsen's latest K-12 design provides a lesson in bio-based construction

2023-03-08T12:34:00-05:00

Henning Larsen has released details of its newest K-12 project in the Danish village of Rønde.

The project worked to add an ultragreen extension to the village’s existing Feldballe School that offers carbon sequestering while incorporating plans for its future disassembly and reuse as components in other constructions.

Photography by Rasmus Hjortshøj - COAST

Using straw, seagrass, and locally-sourced timber as its base palette of materials, the design will eventually have a carbon output equivalent to -3kg of CO2e per square meter per year following Danish standards.

Photography by Rasmus Hjortshøj - COAST

A passive ventilation system helps to further reduce the consumption of energy on a daily basis. Solar panels have been installed on the timber roof, adding a further capacity for carbon independence. Compressed straw panels contained by wooden cassettes form the exterior of the walls, which are then completed with a clay plaster support coatin...

IAAC/WASP team creates ‘solid and expressive’ 3D printed wall made from earth

2023-02-13T13:17:00-05:00

Barcelona’s IAAC has collaborated with Italian 3D printing company WASP on the creation of a 3D printed earthen wall. The element was printed from a mixture of clay and rice fibers, with interlocking timber beams providing support for stair and floor structures.

The 15.7-inch-thick wall was printed in 40 hours using 70 cubic feet of material. Printed in horizontal layers with voids left for the placement of cantilevering timber elements, the team describes their method as one that can “confer both solidity and aesthetic expressivity.”

The prototype was printed using WASP’s modular 3D printing system titled ‘Crane WASP.’ The machinery is composed of a main printer unit that covers an area of 538 square feet by way of a radial mechanical arm, similar to the operation of a traditional construction crane. The Crane WASP system has also been used to deliver the Mario Cucinella-designed TECLA raw earth home which we reported on in 2021.

Image credit: IAAC / WASP

“This work can be consider...

MIT researchers develop method for 3D printing wood

2022-12-29T16:49:00-05:00

A study published then in the journal Materials Today shed light on the world’s first 3D-printed lab-grown wood. By the means of this research, the scientist at MIT demonstrated that deforestation is no longer needed to produce timber.

The researchers developed customizable wood using the cells of a flowering plant named Zinnia elegans, known commonly as zinnia. They first treated the cells with a liquid medium and then a gel solution composed of hormones and nutrients. The researchers adjusted the concentration of the hormones in order to control the stiffness, strength, density, and other properties of the grown plant substance.

According to Interesting Engineering, this is the first time tissue engineering has been used to produce plant matter in a lab. Moving forward, a company named FORAY bioscience was founded by lead author Ashley Beckwith to further develop methods for creating 3D printed wood.

In 2022, breakthroughs in 3D printing and material science challenged how we build, and what we build with

2022-12-22T08:00:00-05:00

2022 was another productive year in laboratories across the United States and beyond, as colleges, manufacturers, and startups strove to challenge the orthodoxy of construction materials. While teams of students and researchers at institutions from Virginia Tech to ETH Zurich sought to push the boundaries of traditional materials such as timber and concrete, disruptive startups sought to broaden this palette with the introduction of everything from recycled plastic to mushrooms.

These investigations into material science were matched by equally impressive advancements in construction processes, marking 2022 as a year that asked ‘how’ we build as well as ‘what’ we build with. As with previous years, 3D printing featured heavily in 2022’s highlights of intriguing construction innovations, be it new nano-structural 3D printed systems that can sense their own movement, or a growing portfolio of real-world 3D printed homes which signal the arrival of the once-novel process as a viable ma...

Penn State to study how fungal biomaterials can help reduce construction waste

2022-12-19T16:24:00-05:00

Researchers at Penn State are undertaking a study into whether fungal materials can replace traditional acoustic insulation funded by the 2022 AIA Upjohn Research Initiative. The team behind the effort, funded in 2021 by both an AIA Upjohn Research Initiative grant and a SOM Foundation Research Prize, is being led by assistant architecture professor Benay Gürsoy from Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture Stuckeman School - Department of Architecture.

The project is titled Fungal Biomaterials for Sustainable Architectural Acoustics and builds on Gürsoy and her team's work at Penn State’s Form and Matter (ForMat) Lab, whose specialty involves fabricating biodegradable building components using mycelium. The new research path will focus specifically on the acoustic absorption properties of mycelium, with the goal of designing and building acoustic panel prototypes to be tested in the built environment.

“Mycelium-based composites are renewable and biodegradable biomaterials tha...

Hempcrete has been added to the U.S. building code appendix

2022-12-05T15:22:00-05:00

For many years, industrial hemp was illegal in the US due to hemp’s association with drug use, despite the fact that it does not contain more than 0.3 percent THC [...] Building residential homes with hempcrete was therefore effectively outlawed until 2018, when the Farm Bill distinguished between hemp and cannabis plants. Then, in September 2022, hemp building materials were added to the model US residential building code, paving the way for legal use in 2024.

The International Residential Code (IRC) accepted a modified appendix in September that some are hopeful could be a catalyst for further adaptation throughout the building industry. Builders for Climate Action spokesman Chris Magwood says its greatest potential lies in commercial construction, though applications within residential design do present inherent challenges owing to drying times, insulation R-Values, and other factors.

Previously on Archinect: Hemp is about to take an outsized role in the building industry's push to go green

"I don't think that hempcrete will ever play a large role in the residential market," Magwood recently explained to Treehugger. "The fact that it is a composite material that uses a lime-based binder means that it is less insulative than other options and more expensive. Somebody has to mix, form, and cure the material, whether that happens on-site or in pre-fab units or blocks. To meet basic minimum code requirements in colder climates requires at l...

World's first 100% bio-based 3D printed home unveiled at the University of Maine

2022-11-22T12:06:00-05:00

The University of Maine has unveiled what it claims to be the world’s first 3D printed home made entirely with bio-based materials. The home, developed by the university’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center (ASCC), measures 600 square feet and features walls, floors, and a roof made of 3D printed wood fibers and bio-resins.

Titled BioHome3D, the single-family project was printed offsite in four modules before being transported to its current site and assembled in half a day. Sandwiched within the 3D printed structure, wall and roof insulation are made of wood, while floor tiles are made from recycled materials. The house itself is also fully recyclable.

Photo credit: University of Maine

“Many technologies are being developed to 3D print homes, but unlike BioHome3D, most are printed using concrete,” said Dr. Habib Dagher, ASCC executive director. “However, only the concrete walls are printed on top of a conventionally cast concrete foundation. Traditional wood framing or wood t...

UVA researchers develop 3D-printed structures made of soil and seeds

2022-07-29T17:36:00-04:00

A research team out of the University of Virginia (UVA) has developed a new innovative and sustainable approach to building that utilizes the power of 3D printing to create structures made of soil implanted with seeds.

The team consists of Ji Ma, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at UVA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science; David Carr, a research professor in the university’s Department of Environmental Sciences; Ehsan Baharlou, an assistant professor in the UVA School of Architecture; and recent UVA graduate Spencer Barnes, who earned his Bachelor of Science in aerospace engineering. Given the environmental benefits of integrating green spaces with buildings, the researchers wanted to investigate the possibility of developing complex structures made of natural materials themselves.

"Supported by the School of Architecture’s fabrication lab and a 3Cavaliers grant, Baharlou established an additive manufacturing fabrication system to 3D-print large s...

Hemp is about to take an outsized role in the building industry's push to go green

2022-07-19T17:40:00-04:00

While most of these buildings are constructed out of more traditional materials like cement, brick, drywall, and plywood, forward-thinking architects and members of the construction industry have increasingly been turning to natural materials as an alternative for the future. Due to its ability to sequester carbon, hemp has landed itself at the forefront of the conversation about natural building.

Hemp’s high tensile strength, pliability, and strength-to-weight ratio are increasingly valuable in the manufacture and design of products like fiberboard and even a new concrete alternative. The recent COP26 conference in Glasgow featured the speculative 'Urban Sequoia' design from SOM that combined hempcrete with other green materials like algae and bio-bricks to create a high-rise tower capable of sequestering 1,000 tons of CO2 per year.

One industry executive says it’s going to change the way we build, and that this is only the beginning in terms of what we’ll see coming onto the marketplace in the next few decades. “We’ve made blueprints for hemp villages,” Jayeson Hendyrsan, CEO of Hempcrete Natural Building Ltd., told the AIA’s Topic A blog. “We want families to live in these carbon neutral homes for generations. While we’re a way off from that being widespread, we...

Company uses algae to develop masonry blocks with help from SOM, Autodesk, and Microsoft

2022-06-10T08:15:00-04:00

Prometheus Materials, a Colorado-based developer of zero-carbon building materials, has announced the securing of $8 million in funding from investors including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, The Autodesk Foundation, and the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund.

The funds form part of an effort by Prometheus to develop a zero-carbon alternative to traditional Portland cement by using microalgae. From its facility at Longmont, Colorado, the company hopes to develop commercial-grade masonry blocks as an “affordable, strong, and durable zero-carbon alternative” to concrete blocks.

Prometheus President, CEO, and Co-Founder Loren Burnett. Image: Prometheus Materials

“To prevent catastrophic climate change, we cannot simply replace fossil fuels with renewable forms of energy – we must also decarbonize the way we create building materials,” explained Loren Burnett, Co-Founder, President and CEO of Prometheus Materials.

“By using biological rather than chemical means to create a strong, dur...

Design team develops bio-glass cladding tiles made from mussel shells

2022-05-31T20:27:00-04:00

London-based architecture studio Bureau de Change and Lulu Harrison, a postgraduate student in Central Saint Martins' Material Futures program, have collaborated to create a series of cladding tiles made from glass using mussel shells. Their work explores alternatives to the processed and unsustainable materials used in traditional glass production that also prioritizes the use of locally-sourced materials.

The bio-glass, named Thames Glass, is made from a mixture of the ground-up shells of quagga mussels, sand, and waste wood ash. These invasive mussel species often clog the transfer tunnels used by water and wastewater services company Thames Water. Rather than being removed and sent to a landfill, Harrison developed an eco-sensitive solution by using the shells as a raw material to produce this unique kind of glass.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Bureau de Change Architects (@bureaudechange_architects)

The biomaterial is entirely handmade, making e...

Expo of biomaterial structures populates University of Virginia campus, created by architecture students and scholars

2022-04-11T09:00:00-04:00

The University of Virginia (UVA) campus has become the showground for an array of creative structures built from natural materials. The Biomaterial Building Exposition (Bio-Build Expo for short) was organized by the university’s architecture school and showcases the possibilities of organic, bio-based materials including salvaged lumber and fungal structures.

Penn State researchers Benay Gürsoy (assistant architecture professor) and Ali Ghazvinian (PhD candidate) collaborated with Arman Khalilbeigi and Esmaeil Mottaghi from Paragen Creative Studio to design a spatial structure made from mycelium blocks. Photo by Sanjay Suchak, University Communications. Photo by Sanjay Suchak, University Communications

The exhibition, and the projects featured within it, were created by a combination of UVA students, visiting scholars, and biomedical engineering researchers, led by UVA assistant architecture professors Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann. “It is both old-school and new-school,” MacDona...

SOM unveils vision for carbon-absorbing cities at COP26

2021-11-12T14:28:00-05:00

With COP26 entering its final day in Glasgow, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill have used the event to unveil their vision to transform the built environment into a network for absorbing carbon. Titled 'Urban Sequoia,' the project is centered on the concept of “forests” of buildings which sequester carbon and produce biomaterials to support a new carbon economy.

To create the scheme, SOM based their approach on an optimization of building design, a minimizing of materials, the integration of biomaterials, and the use of advanced biomass and carbon capture technologies. As a result, the firm estimates that if every city around the world built an Urban Sequoia in line with their design, the built environment could remove up to 1.6 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year.

“We are quickly evolving beyond the idea of being carbon neutral,” said SOM Partner Chris Cooper as the project was unveiled. “The time has passed to talk abou...

New research study indicates chitin could be a suitable building material for Mars habitation

2020-09-30T13:08:00-04:00

A study conducted by Javier Fernandez and colleagues from Singapore University of Technology and Design provides research that the bioinspired material, chitin, would be a viable building material for Mars inhabitation and tool production.

Fernandez shares with Universe Today that by reverse-engineering chitin production and combining it with an analog of Martian soil, new chitinous material was created. This material called biolith has presented itself to be highly useful in creating rigid structures using minimal energy output.

“The technology was originally developed to create circular ecosystems in urban environments, but due to its efficiency, it is also the most efficient and scalable method to produce materials in a closed artificial ecosystem in the extremely scarce environment of a lifeless planet or satellite,” explains Fernandez.

Biocycler wants to recycle construction waste into new building materials

2018-01-30T15:09:00-05:00

Waste from construction and demolition sites accounts for approximately 15-30% of all landfill content in the United States. According to NASA's estimates, more than 500 million tons of often non-biodegradable building materials containing carcinogens and other toxins are sent off to the junkyard yearly.

Seeking to alleviate some of these environmental consequences of the built environment, Chris Maurer of redhouse studio has created the Biocycler, a mobile machine to be placed at demolition sites in order to recycle waste. Maurer, who previously served as director of the non-profit firm MASS Design Group in Rwanda, has teamed up with both NASA and MIT for the project, which is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to build a working prototype.

The machine, which will collect waste on site, uses living organisms, primarily mushrooms, as binders to form ground up trash materials into bricks. Fungi—Earth's great decomposer—contains mycelium, the vegetative part of mushrooms that ...

The case for a semi-permeable architecture

2018-01-29T20:18:00-05:00

Our current built environment squanders too much fresh water and other vital resources, and tips too many poisonous substances into our surroundings. To develop a more sustainable relationship with the natural world, we need to allow chemical exchanges that take place within our living spaces, and between the inside and the outside. We need to embrace permeability.

Professor of experimental architecture, Rachel Armstrong, endorses a renewed symbiotic relationship between the built and the natural worlds and explains the benefits of permeability with the help of recent technological developments in the field of biodesign, such as mycotecture, algaetecture, bioplastics, and a variety of bioreactors.

Arup proposes using food waste as building materials

2017-10-17T15:08:00-04:00

The company argues that organic waste would ameliorate rising levels of waste and shortfalls of raw material, as well as providing industry with cheap, low carbon materials.

Beyond being delicious, peanuts, rice, bananas, potatoes and mushrooms have something else in common—they are all being proposed by Arup group as potential building materials in their new report titled "The Urban Bio-Loop."

THE BIOLOOP Nature becomes an endless source of feedstock for the built environment

According to the authors, the report aims "at demonstrating that a different paradigm for materials in construction is possible." This could be done by diverting, in part, organic waste that is traditionally managed through landﬁll, incineration and composting to become a resource for the creation of construction engineering and architecture products.

CURRENT MODEL Biological loop considering traditional disposal options

Some of the organic materials proposed are: peanut shells, which can be used to produce low-cost partition boards that are resistant to moisture and fire; rice, whose husks can be turned to ash and mixed with cement to reduce need for fillers; bananas, whose fruit...

Exchanging cinderblock for 'shrooms with "fungi bricks"

2017-05-30T12:48:00-04:00

To most people, mushrooms are a food source. To mycologist (mushroom scientist) Philip Ross, fungi are much, much more. In fact, Ross is most passionate about mushrooms’ ability to be used for building materials and it is this is what he primarily focuses his attention on. Recently, the mycologists figured out how to make bricks from growing fungi that are super-strong and water-, mold- and fire resistant.

Referred to as "mycotecture," the mushroom bricks originally were embraced by the art world, but increasingly are being considered for other structural uses.

Stronger and cooler-looking than concrete, the above fungi-brick structure is held together using chopsticks.

Interview with David Benjamin, creator of MoMA PS1's "Hy-Fi" Mushroom Tower

2014-07-01T14:18:00-04:00

"[...] In this project, we're using a living organism as a factory. So the living organism of mycellium, or hyphae, which is basically a mushroom root, basically makes our bricks for us. It grows our bricks in about five days with no energy required, almost no carbon emissions, and it's using basically waste— agricultural byproducts, chopped up cornstalks. This mushroom root fuses together this biomass and makes solid bricks which we can kind of tune to be different properties."

Here are a few more photos of Hy-Fi, the locally-sourced, virtually waste-less biostructure by The Living, which just debuted in the courtyard of MoMA PS1.

Photos by Andrew Nunes.

In the video below, David Benjamin talks with The Creators Project about building the structure from agricultural waste and mushroom root, MOMA PS1's interest in sustainability, and how the Hy-Fi could revolutionize waste-less architecture.

‘Mushroom Plastics’ initiative Ecovative wins 2013 Buckminster Fuller Challenge

2013-10-22T19:00:00-04:00

In the past few weeks, the Buckminster Fuller Institute has been introducing numerous finalist entries for the sixth annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge [...]. Today now, the BFI announced the overall challenge winner: Ecovative, a Green Island, NY-based materials science company that has developed a new class of home-compostable bio-plastics based on living organisms, mushroom mycelia — a high-performing, environmentally responsible alternative to traditional plastic materials.

The 'mushroom material' inventors, Eben Bayer, Gavin McIntyre, and the Ecovative Team, will be awarded the $100,000 cash prize at a ceremony at Cooper Union in New York City on November 18, 2013.

Previously: Announcing the 2013 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Finalists