Emily Young (MArch ’24), Visiting Assistant Professor in the Graduate Architecture, Landscape Architecture, & Urban Design department, and alumni David Paraschiv (BArch ’24) join Terreform ONE to participate in the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The installation, titled, Coding Plants: A Sustainable Artificial Reef and Living Kelp Archive for the Ocean, will be featured in the main Arsenale space, open May 10 through November 23, 2025.
Project Description
In our speculative future libraries aren’t built, but grown. Here botanical elements will be genetically augmented to store the knowledge of specific architectural forms —houses, bridges, communal spaces, and etc. — that can be extracted and used to challenge polluting construction methods. The goal is to design urban environments that adapt and evolve in balance with their surrounding ecosystems. Plants will function as living archives, encoding detailed information within their DNA to allow users to influence and direct their growth and structure. This approach will integrate radical sustainability directly into a semi-natural ecosystem, creating a harmonious blend of hybrid nature and human innovation.
Our synthetic living reef will be the ultimate archive preserving design knowledge. A single gram of plant DNA can, at least theoretically, store up to 215 million gigabytes of data. By embedding design knowledge into living organisms, we propose a suppositional green architectural agenda in which nature is empowered on the genetic level. While this concept may seem hypothetical, it is grounded in recent breakthroughs in genetic engineering. This approach heralds a living architecture that profoundly rethinks conventional building practices while fostering resilience and ecosystem integration.
Our conceptual experiment imagines a semi-natural kelp reef in which architectural records become edible proteins. Encased within vitrines is a collection of suspended, self-contained hybridized organisms that showcase dynamic natural processes. Scientists have injected encoded information—comprising text, images, and drawings—into the genetic material of our novel vegetation, making the reef into a living comprehensive library.
