Danish museum reveals architects using fungi, trees and other natural behaviours to create buildings that work with the environment rather than trying to tame it
How can architects find new, collaborative ways of working with nature at a time of climate crisis? This theme is explored in Living Structures, the first in the new Architecture Connecting series of exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.
‘To really make sustainable architecture, we need another way to look at nature,’ said curator Mette Marie Kallehauge, adding that this goes beyond just seeing it as green trees and flowers but also to what we can’t see, such as bacteria and fungus: ‘intelligent organisms that have been there before us and will probably survive us’.
The museum set out to find architects who were developing research as a fundamental part of their practice, and who were working collaboratively with nature, ‘in a really radical way’. They certainly succeeded, judging by exhibits such as a way of planning cities informed by fungi and mould (ecoLogicStudio), a veneer created from an invasive trees species and a printed brick made from the museum’s waste (Atelier LUMA), and installations inspired by the feedback processes found in nature (Jenny Sabin Studio).
Interdisciplinary thinking, collaboration, and the idea of learning anew from nature to tackle the challenges of sustainability are the recurring themes.
ecoLogicStudio works with bio-digitality, creating algorithms based on the way that living organisms such as fungi and mould behave and using these in architecture and urban planning. This includes an algorithm based on slime mould, which is able to navigate the optimal routes between sources of nourishment.
The studio’s installation Deep.Forest explores a future in which nature is more purposefully curated. Planned with the help of the slime mould algorithm, this cyber garden uses 44 AIR.reactors filled with a Spirulina algae culture to clean the air by absorbing CO2 and cultivate biomass nutrients. This biomass is harvested and converted into a biodegradable polymer for 3D printing. This is used to cover 20 BioDegraders in the form of tree trunks containing coffee grounds and mycelium. The latter feeds on the grounds until it fills all gaps and solidifies to create a new solid trunk.
Atelier LUMA is an interdisciplinary studio focused on developing construction materials particular to the resources of a project’s locality, to reduce the carbon impact of importing materials from elsewhere. Instead, they believe that it’s the people and ideas that should be mobile. Living Structures includes some of the studio’s past work with unconventional materials such as sea salt, as well as materials developed specially for the exhibition. These include a potential alternative to plastic created from local eelgrass and surplus molasses from sugar factories on Zealand, used to make a traditional Danish plug.
Another project creates a veneer made from Heaven, a locally invasive tree. This plentiful raw material is demonstrated in the exhibition on Arne Jacobsen’s classic ‘7’ chair in a collaboration with the furniture manufacturer Fritz Hansen.
The veneer isn’t perfect, says Kallehauge, who says a ‘paradigm shift’ is needed for acceptance of small imperfections as part of a more sustainable process.
Atelier LUMA has also produced a hyper-local material in the form of the Humlebæk Brick, created using waste such as paper from the museum, and 3D printed twice daily in the exhibition space.
Based at Cornell University, Jenny Sabin Studio explores the feedback processes found in nature, and whether it is possible to create intelligent forms and materials that can be scaled up to react like a living organism to the environment. Exhibits include PolyThread, an installation demonstrating the studio’s research into responsive textiles. Other projects include research into the idea of structural colour, which explores creating colour not from pigments but from form.
She hopes that visitors to Living Structures will gain an insight into how interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration is necessary, not only for understanding how nature works, but how this knowledge can inform how we build in the future.
‘I hope they will understand that if we have to build in the world from now on, we need to go back from scratch and think in another way… It’s not an option not to build anything from now on. But what we build relies heavily on our collaboration and interdisciplinarity,’ she said.
Visitors can expect to explore similarly mind-expanding territory in the rest of the six-part Architecture Connecting series, with one exhibition scheduled per year.
Living Structures, until 23 March 2024, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Gl. Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk, Denmark