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ecoLogicStudio's algae and fungi architecture, from Milan's Triennale to Nyon
A look at the London studio that builds with living organisms, from an algae canopy to a mycelium forest indoors.
ecoLogicStudio, the London practice founded in 2005 by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto, works from a simple and rather radical premise: buildings should cooperate with microbial life instead of scrubbing it away. This designboom feature follows that idea through several projects, starting with DeepForest³, shown in 2025 at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan as part of We the Bacteria, an exhibition curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley.
The installation looked like a stand of stripped birch trunks on a sunlit upper floor. In fact the trunks were 3D-printed shells of algae biopolymer housing living mycelium fed on coffee grounds, set among glass vessels of cyanobacteria drawing CO₂ from the gallery and lichen growing from a cork bench. Pasquero puts it plainly: our home is our microbiome.
Earlier work makes the same case at other scales. The Urban Algae Folly at EXPO Milano 2015 was a canopy shaded by growing spirulina, fed partly by the breath of people standing beneath it. The AirBubble in Nyon, Switzerland, is a fabric healthcare garden lined with glass bioreactors of air-filtering algae, while CryoflorE, shown at MUDAC's 2025 Solar Biennial, modelled a miniature city powered by photosynthesis.
Read alongside Colomina and Wigley's book, published by Lars Müller, this is a thoughtful primer for anyone curious about living materials.
Our summary of a story from designboom, published 1 November 2026. Read the original
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