Inspired by nature the Biorock Pavilion is a zero carbon building where form follows abundance
"Designing this project wasn't just about shaping space; it was about pioneering a fundamentally different way of making architecture. We're not just designing a static object, but guiding a dynamic, living process – creating architecture that integrates with, and even promotes, marine ecosystems.”
Adam Holloway, Project Architect
“The Biorock Pavilion will be the first time a building has been grown in a way comparable to biological growth processes of self-assembly with locally abundant materials. We are now getting a much better understanding of how biorock grows and how we can control that to produce a really beautiful aesthetic for this building.”
Michael Pawlyn, Director, Exploration Architecture
“The principles of biorock and how we create biorock give a really fresh perspective on how we can harvest more abundant materials to produce new and lower carbon structures. Which is absolutely what we need to be doing to decarbonise our industry”
Ed Clark, Director, Arup
“Imagining standing on the stage as a performer, looking out at the curvaceous forms and getting a sense of the room giving back to you - the lightness and the curvature of this space is going to be so conducive. You are going to be able to play the room in a very different way. We need to model that. We can’t wait to model that and it’s going to be so exciting when it’s finished.”
Andy Hayles, Managing Partner, Charcoalblue
Biomimicry is learning to design as nature
The Biorock Pavilion is a realistic proposal to grow a building in seawater through the electro-deposition of minerals onto a lightweight steel frame. Once grown and transported to an urban location, the building will function as a performance space for talks.
“Biological structures often grow according to relatively simple patterns. And computational design makes it much easier for us to mimic those patterns and get close to the sort of functional basis of biological structures. That’s really the essence of biomimicry - it’s about understanding the function and mimicking that so we can achieve similar levels of material efficiency to biological structures.”
Michael Pawlyn
Nature represents a vast sourcebook of highly refined design solutions that we can learn from
“Inspired by the geometry of seashells, the core is a conductive metal frame. Looking closer at the pattern: we designed a custom Apollonian gasket, a type of fractal. This allows us to intelligently subdivide the surface, minimizing the metal needed while ensuring the frame efficiently resists the tensile forces within the structure.”
Adam Holloway
“The shape of shells are very materially efficient because they have this double curvature that allows them to resist pressure. So, in this case, the pressure of the sea, or other forces that are exerted on to the creature that lives in the shell. And they resist that by pure compression in the shell. So, the geometry of the shell is specific to that load case.”
Ed Clark
“One of the cheapest building materials around is chalk. And the chalkiest of them, of course, is the coral reef. And that’s made in the sea where there is lots and lots of raw material. So it makes some sense, maybe, to make a building and use that wonderful source of raw material.”
Professor Julian Vincent
CaCO3 Mg(OH)2
Calcium Carbonate & Magnesium
“The thing that is really innovative about the Biorock Pavilion is that we are growing a building. There are one or two buildings that have been grown but those are really from plants. As far as I am aware this is the first time a building will have actually been grown from minerals. And that is the essence of the biorock process, that you can put a very lightweight steel frame in water and then by passing a small electrical current through it you get this build up of minerals on the steel through electro deposition.”
Michael Pawlyn
"Once submerged, we pass a safe, low-voltage current through this mesh. Electrolysis begins, drawing minerals from the seawater to precipitate and solidify onto the frame. This accreted 'stone' isn't just infill; it's designed to work structurally in compression, progressively stiffening the entire shell as it grows working with the tension-bearing metal network within.”
Adam Holloway
“In biology we see adaptive growth, for example if you have a tree in a windy location it grows into the wind, bracing itself against the prevailing wind direction. Both in terms of its geometry, its shape, but also how the material forms on the truck and the branches as it grows to resist that force. We could apply the same thinking to the Biorock Pavilion so we can design the metal framework the biorock is grown onto to encourage the accretion of material where we know the stresses are going to be highest or even put a strain gage on that structure as we grow it and encourage the biorock to form in places where we are measuring the high stress during the growing process.”
Ed Clark
A calcareous deposit is formed electrochemically when a metal frame connected to an electrical power source is immersed in seawater. Calcium carbonate directly acts as a carbon sink, while magnesium hydroxide sequesters carbon through further interactions with CO₂
“I think biorock has the potential to be used in mainstream construction in the built environment in a number of different ways. It’s possibly growing bespoke structures but also given the time that it takes to grow a biorock structure, there may also be good opportunities to grow standard biorock components. Wall panels, roof beams, other kind of structural components that could be grown in advance and then employed onto building projects.”
Ed Clark
"Think about what this means for fabrication. Traditional construction involves transporting materials, assembling components, often with significant energy input and waste. Here, the primary material is sourced in situ from the ocean, and the structure actively grows itself.”
Adam Holloway
“Biorock can be grown pretty much anywhere in sea water. Conceivably you could grow units of biorock like bricks or precast panels and assemble those into a more conventional building. Essentially what you will be doing is making use of available materials. One of things you often see in biology is that animals don’t spend a lot of effort bring materials over vast distances to the location. They bring their evolved ingenuity to the materials that exist on the site and create something wonderful out of those.”
Michael Pawlyn
“The Biorock Pavilion is going to provoke and promote different kinds of performance. And most artists will change the way they perform according to the venue. So if you were a solo violinist and you were playing to a large concert hall you will play one way. If you are in an intimate chamber space, you will play another way. So that comes with the territory. The interest I think around the Biorock Pavilion is it will be the first time anyone has performed inside an organic structure. No-one quite knows how the response from the artist will be, other than it’s going to create a new kind of performance that no-one has ever seen before.”
Andy Hayles
The Biorock Pavilion
A zero carbon building where form follows abundance
Transcript
Adam Holloway Designing this project wasn't just about shaping space; it was about pioneering a fundamentally different way of making architecture.
Michael Pawlyn Biological structures often grow according to relatively simple patterns. And computational design makes it much easier for us to mimic those patterns and get close to the sort of functional basis of biological structures.
Ed Clark So biological forms like this shell are super elegant because structurally they are super-efficient. The mollusc that has created this shell has accreted the calcium carbonate to create this protective shield. And that takes energy.
Michael Pawlyn The thing that is really innovative about the Biorock Pavilion is that we are growing a building. There are one or two buildings that have been grown but those are really from plants. As far as I am away this is the first time a building will have actually been grown from minerals. And that is the essence of the biorock process, that you can put a very lightweight steel frame in water and then by passing a small electrical current through it you get this build up of minerals on the steel through electro deposition.
Adam Holloway Once submerged, we pass a safe, low-voltage current through this mesh. Electrolysis begins, drawing minerals from the seawater to precipitate and solidify onto the frame. This accreted 'stone' isn't just infill; it's designed to work structurally in compression, progressively stiffening the entire shell as it grows working with the tension-bearing metal network within.
Michael Pawlyn The great thing about this approach is that we are making use of abundant materials, we are growing a building in a very low energy way and we are taking carbon out of the environment and locking it up into a building form.
Ed Clark In the built environment, we have shell structures that are efficient and beautiful for all the same reasons. The challenge with our shell structures that we make traditionally is that you have to use an awful amount of material as formwork to create that curved geometry. That we sometimes then forget about when we calculate the embodied carbon of the structure that we have created. But the beauty of the biorock process is that you don’t need that formwork because you are creating that structure, you are growing that structure in an environment where the buoyancy, and the water that surrounds what you are growing helps to create the form without any additional material.
Adam Holloway This shift from assembly to accretion is radical for architecture. We're moving from assembling components to directly cultivating structure, guiding natural mineral growth based on our geometric blueprint. It forces us to rethink design constraints, material lifecycles, and even our relationship with the environment where we build.
Andy Hayles The wonderful thing about the Biorock Pavilion is that it is the focus of those basic principles between the performer and the audience. It’s unembellished, it’s not a huge opera house. It goes back to the principles of that relationship. So as you might gather around a camp fire to share a story or lean in round a candle on a pub table to hear a tale from a friend, or listen to someone speaking in a village square. You are gathered in the Biorock Pavilion around that centre crucible of conversation and kinship.
As we try to decarbonise the construction industry, theatre producers, theatre artists, musicians - everyone is trying to reduce their carbon emissions. And to be able to perform therefore in a building that has been constructed with that as its goal is going to be absolutely fantastic for every artist in the world.
Michael Pawlyn The intention is that when it is fully grown we will float it to the surface, put it on a barge and then we can take it to a city centre - you could imagine it might be moored outside Tate Modern in London or at the Venice Biennale and people could use it as a temporary pavilion for performances.
The Biorock Pavilion
‘How would biomimicry solve the problem of climate change?’
Transcript
Michael Pawlyn Biomimicry often involves asking questions such as ‘How would biology harvest water in the desert?’ And the starting point for this project was to use biomimicry to ask a really challenging question. Which is - ‘How would biomimicry solve the problem of climate change?’
I think one of the clues to this comes from the Vostok Ice Core Data. These were used by Al Gore in his film and show how for hundreds of thousands of years atmospheric CO₂ and temperature followed the same pattern. And then went exponential after the Industrial Revolution. And that is the bit that everyone focuses on. But if you look to the left, you can see that for the whole period prior to the Industrial Revolution CO₂ and temperature oscillated within this steady band, so it seems as though there was some sort of corrective mechanism at play.
The most persuasive explanation for this involves coccoliths. These marine microorganisms grow skeletons from calcium carbonate and when they die, they fall to the ocean bed and become limestone. When CO₂ levels rose in the atmosphere there were blooms of coccoliths, and carbon was transferred from the atmosphere to the lithosphere maintaining the balance.
I think the conclusion you can draw from this is that nature would solve the challenge of climate change by making more things from atmospheric carbon. That’s what we are currently working on at Exploration - how to grow buildings and materials. We are pursuing two main approaches. Firstly, 3D printing using biologically derived materials like cellulose and PLA. As we have done for the printing of the exhibition tables. Secondly, using Biorock which is a way of growing structures in seawater using the electrodeposition of minerals on a steel frame.
Biorock was developed by Wolf Hilbertz and Tom Gore. And we’ve been working with Tom on experiments in Qatar. Using Biorock to control scaling in the pipes while growing materials. These approached allow us to approximate the way materials grow in biology. Growing from the bottom up and often in quite complex forms that achieve high levels of structural efficiency.
Julian Vincent Biologist: One of the cheapest building materials around is chalk and lots of bits of animals are made of chalk. And the chalkiest of them, of course, is the coral reef. That’s made in the sea where there is lots and lots of raw material. So it makes some sense, maybe, to make a building in the sea and use that wonderful source of raw material.
What you then need, of course, is a frame for it to form on and since we are talking about some sort of crystallisation - which requires a surface - the larger the surface area that you can provide, the faster the building is going to be able to grow.
Michael Pawlyn Growing a building is a pretty challenging thing to do. And generally, when you are experimenting in architecture, the easiest building type is some kind of pavilion. Our proposition is to grow a small structure that could be used as a venue for talks.
We looked at the morphology of shells and coral and explored how we could develop a geometrical form that enclosed a column and was generated from some of the key functional starting points. We needed a raked seating bank for the audience, a small stage and a way of entering and exiting. The design developed first towards a kind of morphed amphitheatre with a roof canopy, and then towards a full shell enclosure - the same materials forming walls, floor, seating and roof.
Adam Holloway Project Architect: We started off by looking any the rake of the seats and how that could be blended into a more continuous space that combined the entrance and the auditorium. So, we looked at mathematical surfaces that had properties of visual, vision and continuity within them that could link the two spaces but provide a barrier. A visual and an acoustic barrier between the two.
Michael Pawlyn We worked mainly using 3D computer design software and regularly checked how the scheme was developing by producing 3D models. This was vital to understanding how the complex forms and spaces were working and engaging the rest of the team. We worked with a small group comprising of biologist, Julian Vincent, structural engineer, Ed Clark, from Arup. And theatre consultants, Charcoalblue.
Julian Vincent As far as biomimicry’s concerned, I’m a biologist. And so that’s my starting point. I’m very interested in the way nature functions and it’s the function I like to transport over into technology.
I’ve always been utterly charmed by architecture so the opportunity to try out architecture as a context where I had done a bit of reading but nothing practical. I jumped at it. And Michael’s ideas are lovely.
Michael Pawlyn The next stage will be to secure funding for a scale prototype, carry out further testing on the Biorock and then to pursue the full scale funding for the real thing.
We’d love to get this built. There are very few examples of structures that have been grown. And generally, they have been grown using living plants. I’m not aware of anyone having grown a building from minerals before. And I’m convinced that making more things from atmospheric carbon will become one of the key tools we need for tackling climate change and reducing CO₂ levels in the atmosphere.