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March 23, 2023
Save the date – BIOPROTOPIA Book Launch
May 2, 2023
The Living Room is part of More with Less: Reimagining Architecture for a Changing World, the inaugural exhibition at the Farrell Centre, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, which offers new visions for architecture in the face of the climate emergency.
The Living Room is a bio-fabricated architecture that is grown using locally available waste materials. It is composed of Herdwick wool, a breed of sheep native to the Lake District in north-west England, a mix of sawdust and wastepaper from local mills, and mycelium spores. The use of waste materials benefits regional industries and demonstrates a means to dramatically reduce the environmental impact of construction, whilst allowing us to reimagine the spaces that we inhabit. Our work is a reaction to rigid, hard, permanent buildings, instead we have created a soft, cosy, snug internal space with thick sculpted walls, which can be composted when no longer required.
The Living Room demonstrates that responding to the climate emergency does not mean ‘business as usual’ - it means doing things in fundamentally different ways. In this case we demonstrate how truly sustainable architecture may be almost unrecognisable and this transition provides an opportunity to rethink how we build (grow), maintain (nurture) and inhabit the built environment.
The Living Room was created by the Living Textiles Research Group following months of research, development and large-scale biofabrication by Jane Scott, Ben Bridgens, Dilan Ozkan, Romy Kaiser, Oliver Perry & Armand Agraviador, with help from Layla van Ellen and Aileen Hoenerloh.
