Ecole des Arts Décoratifs

In this series, we ask i-Portunus Houses participants to tell us their stories and experiences. At the end of each story, we invite you to reflect with us on important themes about mobility in the arts and civil society.

Biocalcified textile architecture

Biolcalcified textile architecture is the encounter of Aurélie Mosse, a design-led researcher and teacher from Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, her 1st MA students in Textile Design and their guests: the architects and researchers Bastian Beyer and Daniel Suárez from the cluster Matters of Activity, Humbolt University in Berlin.

Design & biocalcification

Sharing a common interest in biodesign, a field of creation and research hybridising the methods of design with metabolic processes of living organisms such as plants, fungi or bacteria, they met in Paris for a 10-days hands-on workshop sitting at the intersection of textile design, architecture and microbiology. Building upon the Column project – a self-standing knitted-column rigidified by bacteria developped by the architects’ duo, the workshop aimed at questionning how textile designers can work with calcifying bacteria to design bio-based solidified textiles for architectural expressions.

Calcifying bacteria are micro-organisms known for their ability to precipitate calcite and solidify sand given a calcium source and urea through the process of microbiologically-induced calcite precipitation or biological cementation. Also known as biocalcification, this process is used by engineers in the consolidation and repair of sand, brick and concrete structures while rare incursions in the design community relate essentially to sand or concrete-based architectural and urban design perspectives. Here, we have expanded the vocabulary of what a textile-based biocalcified architecture can be with textile design crafts and sensitivity.

The workshop’s journey

The journey started with an inaugural lecture allowing the textile design students to get acquainted with the bio-digital field: an area of design and research exploring the interaction between digital and biological crafts. This was the occasion for Bastian Beyer and Daniel Suarez of an in-depth sharing of their architectural research practice that served as a background for the project. From there, the students -by groups of two- have explored a variety of textile techniques allowing them to distinctively structure jute-based yarns, from crochet to machine-stitching, including weaving or winding. While they all have worked with the same selection of bespoke jute yarns – available in three different thicknesses and known from previous experiments to be an appropriate environment for the calcifiying bacteria to thrive-, each group had its own point of departure, whether a technique, a visual input or a concept leading to distinct design proposals informed by the collective discussions with the host and guests.

While the first week was busy crafting the textile samples, the turning point inevitably was when bacteria entered the conversation during the second week of the workshop. In order to rigidify what was still soft textile samples, we indeed had to proceed to the biocalcification process. To do so, we first imagined and built an in situ tailor-made bioreactor allowing to soak the textiles repeatedly with two distinct liquid treatments in order for biocalStudents exploring the potential of crochet for biolcacified textiles. cifcitation to happen. It meant first to imbue the textiles with the calcite-secreting bacteria and to let them inhabit the textile structures for a couple of hours before proceeding to another bath with the complementary compound. This treatment was developed several times over three days but we could actually observed some first results after 24h. Through the process, the samples are not only hardened but also acquire a white finishing recalling stalagmite textures thanks to the precipitation induced by the bacteria.

As the samples were encapsulated in the bioreactor and therefore not visible apart from a small opening, we were really excited to discover how the biocalcification would have occured on the different samples. Due to the irregular circulation of water within the device, some samples were more calcified than others, but overall it worked extremely well, leading to intriguing white structures with rich visual and textual expressions.

Biocalcified textile results

After cleaning the biocalcificed textiles and letting them dry, we have set up an exhibition space so we could keep trace of the results and share them with the school community on the last day of the workshop. In front of an audience of about 20 people – mainly from the internal community-, the students presented not only the physical outcomes of the biocalcifciation process but also how the samples informed a series of design-led applications and perspectives for architectural textiles’ biocalcification ranging from bioreceptive crocheted structures and architecture or flexible architectural membrane to biomimetic architectural ornaments, urban furniture or modular mashrabiya.

While we initially ambitionned to materialise a collective self-standing textile structures such as a canopy or a space partionner, stakes of time and feasibility and the wish to offer more creative freedom to the students led us to adopt the process described above. The outputs of ths workshop contribute to the expansion of the emerging field of textile biocalcification by first enlarging its vocabulary in term of aesthetical expressions, secondly by demonstrating the relevance of the immersion strategy for biocalcifiying textiles.

Creative mobility in question

“As a host, the i-portunus creative mobility has been an incredible opportunity to develop an ambitious international design-led research workshop for my textile design students, the kind of project I often dream about but that rarely occurs due to the complex logistic it requires. Having enjoyed the richness of an intersdisciplinary and international design-led research environment while training as a student myself in the United-kingdom and Denmark, I’m always keen on to develop such perspectives for my own students. All the more so that the textile design research community is so small that we are really dependant on conversations at the European level. Hands-on time of exchanges such as this one are critical to push the boundaries of design research since there is a lot of tacit knowledge that can’t be made explicit otherwise than practicing together. They are also a fantastic springboard to inform new research projects or applications, which will most likely occur with our guests since we realised through this workshop how complementary our approaches to textile architecture and biocalcification were”.

– Aurélie Mosse

“This mobility allowed us to present our developments and achievements in textile architecture and biocalcification to a larger audience. Applying biocalcification processes on a fibre substrate is a unique example of biofabrication. In this interdisciplinary research, designers and nature co-design textile structures with a distinguished identity and material qualities. It has been an exciting opportunity to see how textile practitioners, in this case, students, confront the design of a fibrous scaffold on a larger scale, out of their comfort zone, and how they approach the topic for biocalfication purposes. In addition, there has been a rich dialogue between all the people involved about what this innovative design process could render in the future. The variety of techniques and solutions developed during the workshop amplify the spectrum of potential applications of this biofabrication process. Furthermore, I highlight the positive work with Ensad and, in particular, with our host Aurélie Mosse which invites us to think about further collaboration and developments in textile architecture and biocalcification.”

– Bastian Beyer & Daniel Suárez

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