Mumbai architect Aditya Mandlik on designing with worms, bees and water

Mumbai-based architect Aditya Mandlik argues, in a guest essay for designboom's Posthuman Utopias series, that buildings have been shaped around one human figure for too long, leaving a tidy world that shuts out microbes, insects, weeds and damp. His studio's answer is the gradient: reading conditions such as soil fertility, light or moisture as values between nought and one, then layering them so different species find their own niche. How sanitised a place should be becomes something to tune rather than enforce.

The most vivid example is Factory 5.0, a pavilion where thousands of kingworms lived in clear acrylic enclosures and slowly chewed through polystyrene. Mandlik says he could anticipate and guide the results but never fully control them, so the building became a process of erosion and decay rather than a finished object.

He is now applying the idea to a modest house in Lonavala, the hill station between Mumbai and Pune, where heavy monsoon rain meets a rush of second-home building. Instead of draining water away quickly, the team is mapping how it moves and pools, then planting by moisture need and flowering cycle so native bees can forage across the seasons.

It is a thinking piece rather than somewhere to visit, but a clear, grounded read for anyone curious about architecture that makes room for other species.

Our summary of a story from designboom, published 2 November 2026. Read the original

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