This September, I will travel to Germany to help deliver Engineered Living Materials 2024, an international conference that convenes leading expertise in material science, synthetic biology, biotechnology, and biophysics around the “what” and the “how” of the our tangible future. This mini-series leads up to a dispatch from the conference in late September.
My last article introduced engineered living materials (ELMs), illustrated their potential, and articulated the obstacles in the way of this promising regenerative industry. Now, I share my interviews with three of the creators:
Joshua English (JE), founder and chief executive of Okom Wrks Labs is a designer who had worked in the field for 27 years, including in data visualization, large system design as well as architectural and industrial design. He has a “not so mild” obsession with materials and is on the quest to discover the most sustainable material solution that ever exist.
Loren Burnett (LB), co-founder and CEO of Prometheus Materials has founded six tech companies, and four of them were based on tech transfer agreements. He has five exits generating $375 million in shareholder gains and raised $190 million in funding. He also founded e-Chromic Technologies, an energy efficient electrochromic window and film company.
Mitchell Joachim (MJ), co-founder of TerreformONE is also a professor of practice at New York University. He was also a university senator and is currently the co-chair of global design at the university. He had formerly worked as an architect as firms such as Frank Gehry, Moshe Safdie and I.M. Pei.
Okom Wrks Labs is developing a replacement for steel (and other biggies) through its structural mycelium solution. Prometheus Materials has developed an algae-based, carbon-negative alternative to Portland cement. TerreformONE is growing gorgeous and durable furniture from mycelium.
Note that the interviews have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Qn: How did you come to tether your professional journey to living materials?
JE: My first love is art; sculpture in particular. I am a maker: I like tangible art. So, designing and making furniture to me is a very fulfilling experience. I am an inveterate designer. Very early in my professional life, I was given a great opportunity to learn how to apply systems thinking to solve seemingly complex problems by putting actionable data at the fingertips of decision makers. At the core of all of the tools in my professional skillset lies a very deep sense of the importance of the design process. Design processes for artists or engineers or chefs or doctors is the same: design, research, ideate, prototype, test, analyze. Wash, rinse, repeat. Which is how – after a decade of exploration – my discovery of structural mycelium happened 5 years ago.
The materials available to us in the business-as-usual world are terrible for the biosphere. So, I have had a lifelong obsession with finding ways to make useful things that don’t decouple humans from the biosphere. We can design solutions that change the model in a way that is regenerative. It’s why I am so obsessed with fungi. The diverse kingdom of fungi is a regenerative bridge between life and death on this planet.
Today, I focus that same obsessive attention on repeatably and reliably creating composite structural materials. When I wake up wanting to solve how we extrapolate the potential of mycelium to serve in load-bearing functions, the designer brain inside my skull feels excited and eager. I am very humbled that I get to spend each day collaborating so deeply with such wonderful living organisms.
LB: Our journey began in 2016 with a Department of Defense initiative to find a way to use locally available and easily transportable raw materials to build shelters and roadways. If you’re in the desert or some other resource-deprived setting, how can you construct strong, durable structures with whatever you’ve got on hand?
Over a five-year period, four professors at University of Colorado Boulder developed the unique process of using microalgae as a living building material. We’re talking about the stuff you find in lakes, rivers, oceans, and fish tanks. Not only abundant and inexpensive, microalgae is ultra-low if not negative on embodied carbon.
A serial entrepreneur who has led other technology companies from inception to exit, I co-found Prometheus Materials in 2021.
WHEN AND WHY?
MJ: Terreform ONE [Open Network Ecology] is a 501c3 nonprofit art, architecture, and urban design research group that strives to manifest environmental and social justice for all beings. We endeavour to combat the extinction of all planetary species through pioneering design acts. In addition, our projects aim to illuminate the environmental possibilities of habitats, cities, and landscapes across the globe.
We operate as an interdisciplinary lab of specialists advancing the practice of socio-ecological design. The group cultivates resilience through innovations in building, transportation, infrastructure, water, food, waste treatment, air quality, and energy.
Qn: How could ELMs revolutionize the way we think about urban design and architecture?
MJ: Buildings have the capacity to act as terrestrial reefs and symbiotic nodes of a biological urban fabric. ELMs are at the forefront of an explosion of interest in integrating natural systems and organic architecture into our built environment. These are fundamentally reshaping the way we build and maintain structures and the way we design the relationships between human settlement and ecosystems. Unlike traditional materials, ELMs are designed to be dynamic, adaptable, and symbiotic with their surroundings. This means buildings can self-repair, adapt to changing environmental conditions, and integrate seamlessly with natural ecosystems. Urban areas that are experiencing more frequent and intense heat waves can develop natural cooling mechanisms, enhancing air quality and improving biodiversity as buildings become living components of the urban fabric.
As carbon-negative, regenerative materials, ELMs have the capacity to upend our dependence on concrete, steel, glass, plastics, and other products of extraction that leave our world irreversibly scarred. By sequestering carbon in construction materials rather than emitting it, ELMs would also lead to cities that actively contribute to the health and resilience of their surroundings.
JE: ELMs are integral to resilient cities that need to adapt to a changing climate. Our infrastructure is already bursting at the seams, and ELMs that can be relied upon to respond to stimuli to perform repairs. This would change how we see the essential services – such as safety and functionality – provided by the built environment. The really disruptive thing about ELMs that rely on living organisms is that they are far less energy intensive than incumbent building material technologies and cheaper to make. Where they create dense matrices for composites, they create a built environment that stores rather than emits carbon.
LB: ELMs are already transforming urban design and architecture by introducing materials that can grow, can be blended with other natural components and formed into products and structures, can adapt to environmental conditions, and more. It’s both my hope and expectation that we’ll soon find ourselves surrounded by ELMs that have been applied throughout our daily lives – offering both sustainable and superior solutions.
Traditional building materials, such as cement and concrete, are resource-intensive climate killers. By contrast, ELMs like Prometheus Materials’ zero-carbon bio-cement and bio-concrete are cultivated using biological processes basically the same way that nature creates seashells and coral reefs. This reduces the reliance on non-renewable resources, waste, and maintenance costs while offering mechanical, physical and thermal properties that are comparable or superior to traditional cement and concrete.
Through a dynamic interaction between buildings and their environment, ELMs also pave the way for innovative architectural designs that were previously unattainable with conventional materials. Architects and urban planners can explore new forms and structures inspired by natural processes and organisms within densely populated cities, providing aesthetic and psychological benefits to residents.
Qn: Reinventing building materials, you buckled in for quite a journey. Overall, is anything working out better than expected?
JE: Yes! We were limited to making parts that were only 200mm long, 100mm-150mm in width. The fact that we’re now making structural components recognizable to builders and architects – 2.5m in length – almost as reliably as they were at 200mm while working from the same general principle is very encouraging. The next key step for us is fully automating that process!
LB: Quite a journey indeed! Our R&D progress and the level of industry acceptance are two areas that have exceeded my expectations. Having moved through low- to ultra-low-carbon to zero-carbon ahead of schedule, we’re now achieving carbon-negativity (through sequestration). These advancements not only improve the sustainability of construction materials but also extend the lifespan of infrastructure, reducing long-term costs and resource consumption. Furthermore, our material has achieved an “A” rating for flame spread and smoke development and multiple ASTM certifications, which has prompted ASTM to modify its own block specifications to be performance-based rather than material-based, opening the door for other ELMs.
Adoption of our solution by collaborators like Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), Sofinnova Partners, Microsoft, the Autodesk Foundation, GAF/BMI and others has affirmed our mission to reimagine the future of the built environment.
MJ: Traditional construction materials have achieved such enormous economies of scale that it is extremely difficult to challenge the status quo by beating it on price. These extractive materials, subsidized by governments around the world, are just too cheap to compete with. As a result, while our projects have ranged from speculative designs to furniture pieces to landscapes to full-scale living pavilions, our role has been largely limited to inspiring new ways of thinking about materials.
We have been heartened by the tremendous interest that the broader public has taken in developing new systems of construction, even if these models fall outside of the competitive product marketplace for now. A critical mass is building, demanding change, creating new funding sources that will further advance the field to the point where, we hope, it just doesn’t make any sense NOT to use ELMs. The pace of this change has exceeded our expectations as the climate and biodiversity crises come into ever-greater focus. People want to take agency over decisions about the built environment they inhabit, and more research and prototyping is being done every day.
Qn: What are the remaining technical challenges?
LB: Evolving our technology to achieve an ever-greater reduction of carbon and even more superior attributes than traditional materials at the scale of commercial production for all kinds of products that redefine what concrete can be and do.
MJ: A major challenge for building with living trees is not having a cell-level understanding of the growth morphology of trees. There are so many factors that go into a tree’s growth: environmental conditions such as wind, light, shade, rainwater availability from season to season; nutrient quality of soil; presence of animals; and more. To scale bio-based architecture, we must develop the capacity to nudge – at the cellular level – living systems into forms that are suitable for human occupation. This must somehow allow nature to do its thing – following its own evolved intelligence – while deciding how to assess whether outcomes are conducive to our desired ends and where to put control points. Today – with steel beams and concrete form work – construction allows for near-perfect control. To work with natural systems, we must accept a degree of unpredictability. We can set up the conditions, but we also have to accept that a living tree is not a 1:1 replacement of a steel beam, and that some degree of unpredictability is a feature, not a bug, of working with ELMs. That said, we can become quite precise about where and in which direction we nudge.
JE: Automation is key. …we have to be able to make the process easier to put raw materials in one end and have reliability come out at the other end.
We need to improve the strength of the fungal matrices to get through acceptance testing with the various codes and standards organizations. Just because an organism can produce a certain morphology of cell structure doesn’t mean it will do so every time. Machine learning will play a crucial role in fine-tuning for reliability. I keep using the word “reliable” because we are talking structural building materials. We can’t just cross our fingers and hope for the best.
Translating the experience of fungi in the forest to a lab and, ultimately, to a factory is a daunting challenge because of the language barrier between humans and fungi.
Qn: Commercialization hurdles for ELMs have included unit size (living things need time to grow!), consumer awareness, and the catch-22 between demonstrated performance and funding. How have these played out during commercialization?
JE: Through repeat results, the public, regulators, builders, and architects seem ready for ELMs but we still need to convince the engineers. Thankfully, we’ve found some great partners who are willing to forego early-stage profitability for acceptance testing.
Funding is definitely difficult to come by when your current prototypes look like something from a sci-fi thriller. ELMs are an unknown unknown while VCs – righty so – demand knowable unknowns.
I am an ultra-distance athlete, so I enjoy a long and arduous path. I keep going because I see a positive shift in available support in both funds and resources for startups who are trying to bring ELMs to the marketplace.
LB: The calibre of our initial investors and strategic partnerships lends a great deal of credibility. Beyond these factors, we continue to emphasize the strength and expertise of our team, the scope of the market opportunity and our clear, executable plan for scaling the business.
In terms of consumer awareness, we continue to educate potential customers and their affiliates about the performance and unique properties of ELMs compared to traditional materials.
To counter the catch-22 between demonstrated performance and funding, Prometheus Materials leverages our early-stage achievements, accolades, and attention.
Scaling-up will involve partnering with third-party algae producers in order to cultivate the necessary components at an industrial scale. Key steps on the bio side include enhancing the growth conditions, improving yield, and implementing robust monitoring systems to maintain consistency and quality.
MJ: The commercialization of ELMs is a difficult but not insurmountable challenge. Already, products such as mycelium leather, algae tiles, or coconut coir architectural siding are commercially available around the world. That said, the obvious hurdle limiting the immediate widespread use of ELMs is that they are not price-competitive.
As long as the true cost of traditional concrete, steel, and other extractive materials is not fully borne by the developers, they will value-engineer ELMs out. We need to fight to ensure that embodied carbon, environmental destruction from extraction, human rights violations from mining and shipping are embedded in the price, making these materials much less attractive than regenerative, living, and local building materials.
Another hurdle is the availability of skilled labor to construct and manipulate these systems. Industrial construction is so efficient because every step is honed and standardized. Builders know exactly what to do with a bag of cement. While there must be a degree of standardization in scaling ELMs, builders working with living systems need to be equipped to handle a medium that is unpredictable and open-ended by design. Overcoming these hurdles require strategic partnerships, pilot projects, and incremental scaling to build confidence and demonstrate viability.
Qn: Today, you sell once-living materials. What would it take for your amazing creations to be truly living? To be able to respond to their environment, to heal when injured, and to regenerate?
LB: Beyond forming natural structures, the biological components of our material would have to be engineered to perform specific functions, such as sensing environmental changes and adapting accordingly.
The ability of ELMs to heal and regenerate is also dependent on ensuring that their can sustain the biological components over time, which requires prime physical conditions for the cells or microorganisms, an adequate nutrient supply, and waste removal. Not (yet!) considerations we take into account when designing buildings today.
MJ: In addition to genetic engineering to enhance material properties, we would need to develop systems to monitor and manage the health of these living materials autonomously, possibly through embedded sensors and automated care protocols. Additionally and borrowing from permaculture – where the many living and inert elements of a productive garden interact with each other to build strength and redundancies in the system – we would create symbiotic relationships between different organisms within the material to enhance its overall functionality and resilience. Finally, ensuring that these living materials can be sustainably sourced, grown, and maintained locally (a major opportunity) and at scale is vital.
JE: That is a great question. Engineering fungi to perform work must honour that fungi are relentless in their pursuit of food.
Most fungi can create really interesting survival structures (called sclerotia). Even in extremely harsh conditions, living sclerotia can survive for decades. With an influx of proper nutrition, this makes for a living asset! Without that, however, sclerotia would continue to ferment until they completely consume the particles that are providing mechanical strength.
Even if we do not assume that we cannot create a system in which ELMs thrive, there are endless temporary applications – conferences, festivals, emergency shelters – where we could render fungi inactive for a suitable amount of time before reactivating them to allow for an organic break-down of those structures. But this isn’t really in the same vein as harnessing living mycelium to repair damage in a controllable way. I just don’t think that without some serious gene manipulation, we can get fungus to stop growing in a way that allows for still-living fungal ELMs.
Acknowledging all that, I applaud efforts in gene manipulation while retaining my focus on reducing complexity. There are more solutions than we can possibly conceive of when tapping into capabilities of fungi, and so it will take curious folks asking all of the questions they can imagine. I just feel that it is no less noble that the lifespan of the engineered organism is limited to the fabrication process, at which point it is de-activated.
Qn: What do you wish customers understood about ELMS?
JE: What they can’t do. Pseudo-scientific cheerleading on how ELMs will make skyscrapers taller and your dog prettier are counterproductive. We should approach ELMs with awe and wonder. We must not needlessly go after lines of inquiry that cause us to be too heavy handed. ELMs won’t solve every problem in the next, say, decade. While I can foresee a future where just about everything we live is seamlessly integrated into the biosphere, I would encourage consumers to follow the data. I would encourage the materials scientists working on ELMs to be rigorous in the analysis of those data.
Death is undefeated, as they say. Perhaps, that spurred a quest for immortal building materials that got us into this environmental debacle in the first place. Designing for disassembly is very fungal. Nature does have examples of nearly immortal entities: bristlecone pines, Armillaria species of fungi, tradigrains. However, their lifespans are utterly different to that of humans. If we are to live in harmony with nature, we must learn to accept decay and design that acceptance into our systems.
LB: That ELMs are sustainability without sacrifice, as evidenced by independent testing.
The world’s building stock is projected to double by 2060 – the equivalent of building an entire New York City every month for the next 35 years. With such ballooning demand, the construction industry MUST move beyond today’s carbon-intensive materials.
??Efforts to capture existing carbon from the air are critical, but with construction, we must start by changing the primary source material from one that emits 8% of annual CO2 emissions (~53 gigatons of CO2 emitted globally on an annual basis and growing) to one that is zero-carbon or carbon-negative.
MJ: Genetic engineering can be a good thing. A very good thing, actually, if it allows us to create a built environment that is climate-resilient, self-regulating, self-healing, and carbon-sequestrating.
Qn: What groundbreaking applications do you foresee for ELMs in the next decade?
JE: Living windows: algal glazing interfaces seem very promising. I also see some really groundbreaking (pun intended) applications in ELMs that regenerate arable land.
Also, using micro-CT to validate and iterate collaborations with living organisms by analyzing mycelial kinetics and the morphologies of the hyphal strands.
MJ: ELMs used in disaster-prone applications because they self-repair after damage from events like earthquakes or storms. ELM farming structures that integrate with natural ecosystems to improve soil health and crop yields. Urban infrastructure, where living walls and roofs provide insulation, reduce energy consumption, enhance urban biodiversity and air quality, and dynamically respond to human use and environmental conditions, enhancing both functionality and user experience. Integration of ELMs with smart city infrastructure could enable urban environments that are sustainable, resilient, intelligent, and responsive to the needs of their inhabitants. The sky is truly the limit!
LB: That zero-carbon bio-cement and bio-concrete replace the complete array of known applications for traditional cement and concrete as well as novel applications that traditional materials simply cannot support. ELMs are poised to revolutionize not only construction but also healthcare and biotechnology.
Qn: If you were granted just one wish, what would you ask for?
JE: For all humans to understand that we are not separate from the biosphere.
MB: That we turn back time and start from the standpoint that sustainability is both essential and achievable rather than playing catch-up and retroactively healing our world.
LJ: That buildings everywhere become living, breathing elements integrated productively into urban ecosystems, regenerating environments and providing habitat for both animals and people.
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We need living materials because the traditional materials, products, and methods of construction are inadequate if not altogether obsolete.
Greenhouse emissions plague the entire lifecycle. Toxicity is prevalent. Extractive manufacturing is on a whole other level of a burning platform. Not to mention that traditional materials depreciate from day one: concrete erodes, metal corrodes, timber loses structural strength, corners chip, dyes fade, and so on.
While they have taken us to this point, traditional ways of creating, operating, and decommissioning our built environment are a liability going forward because they are based on outdated assumptions. The chief of those is that humans cannot sabotage this planet. These creators have taken on the ultimate challenge of going up against the system that, surely, isn’t going to welcome them with open arms. What can we – changemakers who have dedicated our carers to ushering in a future where all can thrive in harmony with the planet – do to smooth their path?