How a “reawakening of the architectural imagination” is reshaping Europe

I think a vision of how we live in Europe is needed. How is it we’re going to live that’s European, that’s different from America, that’s different from a watered down version of China? It’s ours. And I think we need to spend some time on that question and really start to think beyond what already exists.

This, says Rachel Armstrong, ZAP Professor of Design-Driven Construction for Regenerative Architecture at KU Leuven, Belgium, is the opportunity Europe must now grasp through a “reawakening of the architectural imagination”.

A former vice chair of the supervisory board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, Culture and Creativity Knowledge and Innovation Community (EIT C&C), and senior TED Fellow, Armstrong spoke to Innovators Magazine at the recent European Innovation Council (EIC) Summit in Brussels on the living materials and economies critical to this reawakening.

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What living materials are we learning we can build structures with? And how can these living structures breathe new life into the natural environment?

I think there is a vision of a Europe for the people living within our communities that would make it the best place on Earth to live.

We have an issue in one way, in that we have inherited a very strong industrial legacy. And one of the things about the industrial legacy was the use of new materials like steel, glass, and concrete, using it on a massive scale. It enabled new kinds of buildings that required new technologies like elevators, which meant we could build up in a way that we couldn’t do before. If we change materials for making buildings, we’re probably going to need new types of buildings. You cannot make a 20 storey building using mycelium bio composites. Right now, we have no weight bearing biomaterials. What that might mean is that we look for less dense cities, so essentially our buildings may need to be a bit shorter. Because we won’t get rid of the concrete. Concrete is still a great material, but it shouldn’t be used for everything.

The use of biomaterials is, in the modern context: claddings, flooring, furnishings, fittings, surface finishes. We can grow these materials rather than extract them out of the ground. But I think we’re in the transition period between what would have been, let’s say, the rural and agricultural way of making buildings and the industrial way of making buildings in the sense that when the first bridges were built of iron, they still had dovetail joints which were designed for wood. And it was only later, within about 30 to 40 years, that the spanning capabilities of steel were discovered. So I think we are going to discover the properties of biomaterials, these grown resources, and I would say we’re looking at an era of wood building. If we want to reduce concrete with that, we have to deal with issues like fire risk and the maintenance of wood. But it is all possible, we just have to think of new types of buildings along with that, we can’t just think through old paradigms and substituting new materials. We need a reawakening of the architectural imagination. The new European Bauhaus initiatives can help us do that through community initiatives. I’m seeing some great kind of social programs that are coming out of that.

I think there is a vision of a Europe, that is maybe not necessarily a greater world economy than China, but for the people living within our communities, it is the best place on Earth. I don’t think we have to be the richest people on Earth and have the most capital to be the wealthiest. I think that there are some real questions about how we can achieve that, that are really graspable.

What would this look like at the community level?

I believe that a bottom up movement is needed. We cannot wait for bureaucrats to give permission. We saw that in coronavirus, there were initiatives taking place from the bottom up, for example, the teddy bears in windows, so that the children wouldn’t get scared. They could go for walks and there’s nobody in the street, but they had teddy bears in the window. That’s amazing. Look at what our community could do. We saw the most amazing acts of kindness during the pandemic. I think we can draw on that camaraderie, that sense of working together.

I also think the key is the SME. We’re not going to escape a global economy, we want to be global partners, but we can do that at the same time as being really good neighbours. We can be very successful businesses without becoming trillionaires. There’s a point where you have enough money, right? And that money should be reinvested in community, because that’s what makes the living experience great.

If everybody’s got enough to eat, everybody’s got a roof over their head and everybody has enough to get on with their life, then the reduction of inequalities make everybody’s life great. So SMEs are fantastic because they are the source of economy. They use and make strategic use of local resources. Local skills can be involved in the training of communities, they can be the sites where we have sustained employment, sustained education.

I think that we need a European-scale discussion of how this could work, not just a network, not just hubs, but a kind of economy. How can this be understood as having value to our European community?

Initiatives like EIT, as well as the EIC, are important in this. EIT gives us the education, it gives us money to help SMEs connect. It might give us money to help organise meetings where SMEs can start to mobilize, and the commons comes back, the commons of ideas, of spaces, which really has to be part of the future European identity, because that is what makes us great, not mean-mindedness and individual wealth. What we can do for others genuinely, not just as a tokenistic maxim, it’s the way that nature works. Nature has no trillionaires. The biggest animal in the world is a blue whale. It doesn’t carry around a great stack of coins on its back promising to pay the bearer a sum of something for later use in the future. Nature is about the flow, it’s the through-flow of things that you generate wealth by, yes, consuming, but also producing and sharing. And that makes a lively economy.

What would you say the role of architecture and design is playing in this current UN decade of ecosystem restoration?

It’s about resource use and reutilization. We need to consume to live, that is the work of life, but it is what we produce at the end of that, and the story of that. We can choose to compost, we can choose to clean our water if we have the right technological platforms.

The problem is in cities when you have no soil, there is this disequilibrium that comes with having such a density of people on the most fertile soils in the world, covering them over with concrete and tarmac. The biodiversity in the soils in cities mean that a banana skin would take a lot longer to compost in urban soils than it would in rural soils. Our most beautiful, fertile delta soils is where the cities grew up, because those were the most fertile regions and those are the soils that we’ve killed.

But in terms of what architecture can do, it is about rethinking the daily rituals of life, identifying which technologies can help us with that. If we think differently about homes, as ecosystems of exchange, and really think through the metaphor of a soil, or an ecosystem for living in, then what in the daily rituals do you do with your eating, your cooking, your waste management? If we change the program by the technologies we have around us, we could change the impacts. I can see that in the prototypes that we’re making. I genuinely believe it is possible.

What has excited you most about the design projects you’ve been involved with, and what are you working on just now?

My main current project would be the idea and the realisation of the circular home. We think of homes as boxes that receive resources. We might call those utilities. These are the things that we need to perform the work of life. And we talk about circularity but we don’t really have the platforms that enable us to turn one thing into another and put these through genuine, useful cycles.

I am thinking about how we might do that within the home. I’ve been thinking specifically about wastewater and harvesting biomolecules from wastewater using microbial technologies. So where do microbial technologies come from? Well, for life to complete its circles, we need soil. When things die and go into the soil, there’s a whole set of transformations that take place led by microbes that allow those biomolecules from our bodies to go back into the world in all kinds of different ways. And our industrial technologies just don’t do that. We have recycling plants but that requires a lot of energy. So how much of this can we actually do at home? There’s a lot of, let’s call it fatigue, of sorting your rubbish and putting it into bags, and then waiting for a market-based solution.

But can we actually have the reinvigoration of a home economy? The ethos is an ancient Greek idea of essentially a circular home. We’ve lost this idea of what a good home economy is. We’ve become consumers of services rather than producers – and the only way we can complete the circle is by transforming our waste genuinely at the point of production into new services. We had one application, which unfortunately failed, that was using wastewater to make new washing powder so that you could have a loop of washing powder production that would never go into the stream. We can do that by the strategic use of solar energy and microbes. The other one is using microbial fuel cells, to convert waste biomass, like kitchen waste into bio electricity. These are not industrial scale, this is more like home brewing. But it’s exciting for me to think that if all the lights went out, or there are climate change disruptions or, God forbid, war or social disasters affect us, we can maintain a basic standard of living on the autonomy of an economy of home.

If the worst happens, how far can our home support us? That’s what I’ve been looking at. And then once you’ve got these basic platforms, how might we network them to form communities? There are efficiencies of scale, obviously reusing your wastewater works better at the scale of a community than individually. But you still may have emergency power, clean water, sanitation, and enough to keep going whilst things settle. But then we can start to think of how that is socialised at the community level, and then we can start to think about how that reinvigorates our environment, how we can start to bring nature closer into these spaces because if we’ve got healthy sludge from a microbial fuel cell, we can now start urban soil making rather than harvesting bogs, like Ukraine’s lovely chernozems soils, and we can start putting them on our rooftops, using our own sludges to make soils for planting. Cities would literally become greener without depriving natural areas of their resource.

This is that’s what I’m obsessed about. And all the deep tech explorations I’m doing are about looking to better figure out a relationship with nature which makes a home economy that can support families, then communities and later on cities.

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