‘Living Architecture’ For Sustainable Buildings

If we want to build a sustainable future, we may have to revisit what it is we’re actually building things out of. Will Srubar, a University of Colorado Boulder materials and engineering researcher, argues that, living, self-growing, and self-repairing structures may be our best bet to green up the construction industry’s act.

Srubar & Team have created a genetically programmed E. coli to create limestone particles with different shapes, sizes, stiffnesses and toughness. In another study, they showed that E. coli can be genetically programmed to produce styrene – the chemical used to make polystyrene foam, commonly known as Styrofoam.

In their most recent work, they used photosynthetic cyanobacteria to grow a structural building material – and kept it alive. By keeping the cyanobacteria alive they harnessed the exponential growth of bacteria to grow many bricks at once – demonstrating a brand new method of manufacturing materials.

Of course, pivoting to living materials would require a massive paradigm shift, even if scientists figured out how to make these materials both practical and cost-effective.

Developing living materials, supposedly, wouldn’t just cut financial costs of repairs and assembly, but also, do away with many of the environmental tolls of manufacturing conventional building materials.