Tag: Architecture

Sawdust makes for stylish furniture, while flags embedded with seeds have a blossoming afterlife. Now, a research team from the University of Virginia is creating building elements from soil impregnated with stonecrop seeds. The 3D printed, one-metre high walls are soon ablaze with lush green. These reusable structures are not only low in emissions but also store CO2, while...

New beaches are being made from old glass bottles, while egg shells morph into tiles for home. Now an LA startup is using recycled plastic to create houses with up to 80㎡ of living space. Polymers, 60% of which come from plastic bottles and food packaging, are processed to form a mass which is 3D-printed into a simple shape....

Cocoa plants aren’t just used to make chocolate and buildings become more flexible. Now, an international research team has developed a design concept from which humans, animals, plants and organisms such as microbes could all benefit. The idea is to cover houses in several layers. Each of them is tailored to the needs of the organisms within. Humans, for...

Flexible building design is good for the environment. Traditional cement production is not as it's responsible for 8% of global CO2 emissions. A statistic that an American startup is striving to change. Inspired by marine ecosystems, the female founder experimented with bacteria that produce calcium carbonate. One of the company’s first products are stone tiles, manufactured in a patented process...

Peanut shells are good for plants. Leftovers from chocolate production can be useful too. With its design for a smart village, an Australian company wants to provide businesses from the cocoa sector with a creative environment. The goal is to drive innovation for the circular economy and reduce the industry’s carbon footprint. The proposed Ecuadorian village is inspired by...

Metal isn’t always needed to make knives. Sustainable pallets can be made from tropical materials. Students from Karnataka in India are hoping to substitute steel in house constructions after integrating a bamboo net into a spherical stone shell. They discovered that this material can be used to make lightweight slabs that can nevertheless carry weights of up to 700...

A flick of the wrist and a sofa can be turned into a bed. Today more than ever it’s important to have flexible household rooms. Cue a Toronto-based company which has designed a donut-shaped skyscraper with windows inside and out. The real revolution: all internal pillars and walls are mobile, meaning the shape can be configured in any way,...

A lightbulb moment. Transparent wood was first introduced as an alternative to glass or plastic in 2016. To create the see-through material, lignin - the component in wood that absorbs most light - is removed. The resulting pores need to be filled to reinforce the wood again. Until recently that was achieved with synthetic polymers from non-renewable raw materials....