The National Gallery of Victoria is bringing plant-based design to the public with Plant Life: The Nature of Design, a new exhibition opening free at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia on 28 August and running until 7 February 2027.
Designed by Ferma Studio and ReCraft Design Studio – these light pair a reclaimed concrete core sample with a lampshade of bacterial cellulose, grown through kombucha fermentation until it turns soft and semi-translucent.
The renovation of a former nineteenth-century electrical depot draws its materials, almost entirely, from the few kilometres of southern France around it.
Sebastian Cox and Studio Weave’s Intelligent Garden pavilion is grown from mycelium and ash felled to dieback – a low-carbon, compostable structure made almost entirely from waste.
A team at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has worked out how to turn baker’s yeast into an architectural surface.
With thirty-plus events on bio-materials, repair and circularity, this year’s design week highlights that sustainability concepts have beyond the fringe.
Attention is being cast on blue biomass – materials made from seaweed, seagrass, algae and shell-based minerals. This revolution is starting to move from lab bench to building site, widening the bio-based toolkit without using arable land or freshwater.
This calm retail interior features a biocomposite brick made by compacting local soil with spent tea leaves using a traditional rammed-earth technique. Pressed rather than fired, the “tea-earth” material turns waste into a tactile architecture – all with lower embodied carbon and a circular end-of-life.
From mushroom leather handbags to seaweed straws and air-purifying paint, the National Gallery of Victoria’s new exhibition is a love letter to the ingenuity of designers reimagining the materials of daily life.
Studio TOOJ’s DUK collection quietly disrupts the boundaries between form, function and materiality. Conceived as an exploration of illusion and tactility, the made-to-order series presents sculptural pieces that appear to be soft cloth draped in space – yet on closer inspection, each one reveals itself as a precisely carved, immovable form.
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