Architecture Center for regenerative materials

TEAM PORTRAIT

VIDEO (by the team)

INTERVIEW
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1. How did you form the team for the competition?
Bento started its activities two years ago. First, it was three friends, Charles, Florian and Francois, who left recently – we all studied together in Brussels – that wanted to continue the adventure together after the studies. At the beginning, the work was based on experimenting and searching on natural/living materials. Bento really started from that approach, from the raw natural material, to feed the architecture. Corentin joined the team later and added his knowledge on earth construction, with the same logic, material and architecture that feed each other, while both experimenting with materials and designing project. Doing the competition was the logical following step for us! It enabled us to outscale our experimental process on a bigger project, first theorical, and after, we hope so, real…

2. How do you define the main issue of your project, and how did you answer on this session main topic, Living cities?
The starting point would be the answer to the last question. When we started experimenting around the mycelium, we tried to understand how the material works. This is a very specific material.  The mycelium, is the root network of the fungus. This has huge stakes in reducing the impact of construction. It is living matter, which works by proliferation. In fact, unlike most other construction materials that work with a binder whose production requires excavation, cooking and whose setting is chemical and irreversible, the mycelium works as a growing network. From a cloned cell, the mycelium is inoculated into a sterilized plant substrate, hemp, within a mould in which the shape and growing conditions are controlled. So, this would be the first link with the session topic, talking about a Living material, to build the Living city. Our answer started from our past and present research, it’s quite an exciting link!
Starting from this understanding of the proliferation process, we wanted to outscale little by little, from the recipe we developed bricks, then furnitures, a small construction and, what we would like to implement in our project for CIVA, a construction at a bigger scale, that would use all the properties of the material. Mycelium has good insulating and acoustic properties. Then, we imagined we could use this natural material to insulate all the existing building, and the new building we would build at center of the project. Following the proliferation process, we dreamed we could imagine a growing insulation, that would encage a secondary structure we would fix on the masonry, and would grow along! A living insulation!
Secondly, we thought the program could be an answer to this first point. We can talk about natural materials, insulation, but how could we ensure the supply? Indeed, as a congested European metropolis, integrated into the network of the European megalopolis, Brussels is highly dependent on supply circuits for raw and, above all, processed materials. Within the metropolis, only high added value economy is generated. We would suggest that the metropolitan area could accommodate production sites for materials based on plant fibbers and mycelium, in order to be able to supply the entire built fabric of Brussels. For us, the had to be at the center of this process! Then, we decided to transform a large part of the old building, the building from 2000, into a laboratory and place of production, inside the city to produce for the city. We called it « Micro-Factory ». The materials produced in the "Micro-Factory" are ready-to-use bricks or insulating panels. All the interior insulation of the "Architecture Center for regenerative materials" is carried out with its panels in a logic of short circuits and circularity. This one proposes the installation of a laboratory on the ground floor, structure which will accompany the production of building materials in the basements of existing buildings. Thus, it is the 2500m2 of basement that is transformed into a large production hall, lined with incubators and pasteurizers of the raw material. This could be replicated on a larger scale. This system could be generalized, and we could see buildings under renovation producing, within their vacant floors, their own “growing” insulation. A living program!