Assistant Professorship of Architecture and Construction Dirk E. Hebel, ETH Zürich and Future Cities Laboratory Singapore. Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

The 15th International Architecture Exhibition, entitled “Reporting from the Front“, aims to identify “frontiers that need to be expanded in order to improve the quality of the built environment and consequently people’s quality of life“. The Assistant Professorship of Architecture and Construction at ETH Zürich Dirk E. Hebel addresses this challenge from the perspective of building materials. This perspective confronts the inconvenient truth that the materials required for the building of future cities – such as sand or metals – are finite.
The 21st century needs to spark a radical paradigm shift in how habitats are materialized. This is especially so for those who are less economically privileged. While the first age of industrialization resulted in the conversion from regenerative to non-regenerative material sources, our time should reverse this pattern. This would require a shift from a mining-based mentality towards an ethic of cultivating, recycling, recovering, breeding, raising, farming, and even growing future building materials.
This novel approach to renewable building materials also implies a renewed appreciation for decentralized, local and renewable production strategies and methods. Material availability must be decoupled from mining technologies or transportation logics. And material production should deplete neither our planet’s resources nor its energy reserves. Mines run dry, yet bio-chemical processes can be regenerated with the most reliable resource we have: the sun. Together, renewable materials and decentralized production have the potential to provide the appropriate material basis required to house those people of our planet in desperate need of shelter and security in dignity without forcing them into economic dependencies.
Any shift of this magnitude needs to respect local cultures and ecologies. Varying norms, regulations, and standards need to be developed to mediate between the global environmental principles and local building practices. Advocating for renewable building materials, be they recovered or cultivated, does not imply a return to a romanticized pre-industrial age. Rather, research in this field suggests that to progress within our current industrial paradigm is impossible; we will need to reinvent it, technologically as well as economically and socially. Addressing this challenge will involve the development of new construction methods that allow the systematic disassembly of existing built structures. This would allow existing materials to be preserved either by keeping them within a circular economy or by returning them to the eco-sphere (a house can not only be grown, it can be composted after use).
Our contribution to “Reporting From the Front” takes the form of a laboratory showcasing research work produced at the ETH Zürich and the Future Cities Laboratory Singapore in collaboration with partners such as MycoWorks Inc. in San Francisco and the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at the TU Delft. The exhibition features examples of new building materials derived from mushroom mycelium, bacteria, grasses, and waste. It also displays the power of an international, interdisciplinary network of researchers, academics, and professionals working on commonly defined challenges.