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Bio-Tessera

Project details

Programme
Cluster RC7
Year 1

Bio-Tessera explores a new paradigm of architecture where aging, repair, and biological vitality are no longer seen as failures but as opportunities for continuous evolution. By integrating living materials such as mycelium into the architectural lifecycle, the project challenges the modernist pursuit of permanence and sterile uniformity, and instead advocates for a dynamic material ecology that embraces change.


Through digital fabrication, machine learning, and climate-responsive strategies, Bio-Tessera envisions a building system that not only grows and decays but also invites practices of tending—a mode of architectural care that unfolds gradually, where repair and renewal are woven into everyday inhabitation. This tending logic does not merely restore what has been lost, but cultivates new layers of resilience, and ecological reciprocity.


This project traces a design journey that moves from experimental material research to environment-driven fabrication strategies, ultimately imagining architecture as a living interface—one that evolves with its surroundings, embodies computational intelligence, and gestures toward a future of adaptive, co-evolving built environments.

Students

01

Conceptual Framework

What is Bio-Tessera?

What is Bio-Tessera?

Bio-Tessera extends the logic of tessera, moving from fragmented stone to living systems. It creates an adaptive ecology that not only reflects biological artifacts but continuously tends the building—caring, and repairing, it as it evolves.

By addressing mycelium as a core research topic, Bio-Tessera aims to understand its material behaviour and afterlife management. Extending this research through numerous countries shows that mycelium requires a localized biomaterial tending process.

Global Experiment of Mycelium Erosion

By addressing mycelium as a core research topic, Bio-Tessera aims to understand its material behaviour and afterlife management. Extending this research through numerous countries shows that mycelium requires a localized biomaterial tending process.

Reinterpreting the temporal changes of buildings through adatable mycelium components provides a system that can re-activate building parts over time. Ageing and decay of mycelium becomes a design language fostering the idea of temporality.

Bio-Components and Re-Activating Mycelium

Reinterpreting the temporal changes of buildings through adatable mycelium components provides a system that can re-activate building parts over time. Ageing and decay of mycelium becomes a design language fostering the idea of temporality.

02

Material and Fabrication

Bio-Composites

Bio-Composites

Accepting the decay, aging, and erosion of biomaterials, the research narrows toward integrating mycelium into building components — transforming material and fabrication studies into living elements of architectural design.

Due to construct our bio-buildings with fragmented thinking, using mycelium's bonding and welding principles with timber ensure an adaptable construction strategy for the future applications.

Bio-Bonding: Timber-Mycelium Composite

Due to construct our bio-buildings with fragmented thinking, using mycelium's bonding and welding principles with timber ensure an adaptable construction strategy for the future applications.

Using concrete as a secondary material allows structural forces and spatial logics that geometry needs. Layered casting reveals how material behaviour not only informs strength but also shapes architectural formation over time.

Concrete as a Permanent Layer

Using concrete as a secondary material allows structural forces and spatial logics that geometry needs. Layered casting reveals how material behaviour not only informs strength but also shapes architectural formation over time.

03

Tending with Machine Learning

Training RGB color levels of brown to understand mycelium's afterlife creates a bridge between designers and material to care building's condition by starting the examination from small scale analysis.

Detecting the Mycelium Browning

Training RGB color levels of brown to understand mycelium's afterlife creates a bridge between designers and material to care building's condition by starting the examination from small scale analysis.

Live Detection System

Live Detection System

By analysing mycelium through sensing technologies, the system reveals patterns of growth and transformation, enabling people to draw insights and better understand the environments they inhabit.

04

Environmental Driven Design

Integrating climate data into building form provides information visualising the parts that need tending over time. By combining different environmental simulations, project aims to shift from designing for context than designing with site dynamics.

Point Cloud Analysis

Integrating climate data into building form provides information visualising the parts that need tending over time. By combining different environmental simulations, project aims to shift from designing for context than designing with site dynamics.

It generates annual climate data clouds, translating environmental patterns into spatial insights to design geometries. These dynamic forms explore how architecture can adapt and respond to shifting ecological conditions.

Climate Form Research

It generates annual climate data clouds, translating environmental patterns into spatial insights to design geometries. These dynamic forms explore how architecture can adapt and respond to shifting ecological conditions.

Responding to the climate form, materialisation of abstract geometry is constructed according to materials behaviour in the condition of climate voxels. The system creates consumption maps of materials in tessera scale for preventing excessive use.

Material Allocation Algorithm

Responding to the climate form, materialisation of abstract geometry is constructed according to materials behaviour in the condition of climate voxels. The system creates consumption maps of materials in tessera scale for preventing excessive use.

05

Tending Narrative

Aerial View

Four variations

Two variations

Street scene render

Acknowledging the sensitivity of biomaterials to environmental conditions, Bio-Tessera designs not only a building but a system that ensures a self-caring process allowing community to be more involved into their buildings from small to large scale.

Tend for Future

Acknowledging the sensitivity of biomaterials to environmental conditions, Bio-Tessera designs not only a building but a system that ensures a self-caring process allowing community to be more involved into their buildings from small to large scale.

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