Beyond the Brick: Collaborations with a Sensing Microbial System in the Built Environment

Abstract

The environmental damage caused by buildings has become clear over the past two decades. Their construction and operation significantly worsened the climate crisis through enormous annual CO2 emissions. Rectifying this damage will require an ideological shift, one that involves working with invisible microscopic living systems. The very same living organisms that have helped shape the Earth’s ecosystems over billions of years.

At present, designers have made efforts to reduce our dependency on carbon-intensive resources by integrating living organisms into the built environment using biomaterials. However, difficulties keeping organisms alive have reduced their implementation to mere fabrication tools. Emerging synthetic biology techniques present an opportunity to integrate organisms into the built environment through engineered living materials. These materials can self-assemble and maintain the embedded properties of microbes, such as self-healing and adaptive response capabilities. The design process focuses on shaping the conditions for their livelihood through the simultaneous design of form, matter, and microbe, exemplifying an organism-centric design process that spans across scales.

In this thesis, I propose that living materials offer a path to address the environmental repercussions of the built environment while also transforming how we inhabit and interact with buildings over their lifespan - achieved through a collaboration with microscopic living organisms. To this end, I explore the design and fabrication of a biocemented engineered living material through in silico, in vitro, and in vivo methods. I propose a design methodology driven by wet-lab experimentation and define design constraints for macro-scale applications. I then fabricate biocemented brick modules and demonstrate their ability to bind into larger assemblies. Lastly, I evaluate the microbial viability of the designed living material and demonstrate sensing and reporting capabilities on the biomineralized surface.