Agro-Based: The Latest Architecture and News

A building material rarely begins where architecture encounters it. By the time concrete reaches a construction site, its limestone has already been quarried, processed, and transformed. Timber arrives long after the forest. Glass appears detached from the sand from which it was made. By the time materials enter construction, much of the landscape and industry that produced them has already disappeared from view.

Across India and the SWANA region, another material supply chain is becoming visible. Rice husks, coconut fibres, sugarcane bagasse, and date palm residues, once treated as agricultural leftovers, are increasingly entering architecture as insulation, composite panels, fibreboards, and cement substitutes. Rice mills, coconut plantations, sugar factories, and date farms are increasingly becoming part of the architectural supply chain.

+ 7

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) accounts for over one-tenth of the global population, approximately 800 million people, practicing urban agriculture worldwide. In the United States, millions of citizens lack access to supermarkets. Urban farmers play a crucial role in addressing food security issues in American cities.

Historically, the distance between rural and urban areas has never been greater, making traditionally rural food sources widely inaccessible. Cities initially would develop around centralized markets that brought produce from farmlands to urban centers. Today, urban agriculture is revitalizing this connection between city dwellers and agricultural products.

+ 1

The practice of upcycling –present in a variety of industries from fashion to construction– not only revitalizes discarded items, adding new values and functions, but also contributes to turning them into valuable resources. Adopting the spirit of the circular economy by harnessing agricultural waste such as corn cobs, rice straw, and sugar cane bagasse for building materials marks a fundamental shift towards sustainable practices, promoting a closed-loop system that minimizes waste and optimizes resource efficiency.

CornWall®, developed by StoneCycling, is a pioneering innovation in this regard. Inspired by the need to shift to a bio-based economy, it incorporates a transformative solution that addresses the pressing concerns of the construction industry's environmental impact. It is a wall-finishing material made from plant biomass, obtained mainly from the cores of regionally sourced corn cobs. This organic waste is widely available and is usually destined for fermentation, burning as biomass, or becoming simple organic waste. We spoke to Ward Massa from StoneCycling to better understand this material.

Willow Technologies is a material research and building technology practice that has been selected as part of ArchDaily's 2023 Best New Practices. Founded by Ghanaian-Filipino designer and architectural scientist Mae-Ling Lokko, it operates in the gap between research, development, and diffusion of bio-based building materials. Working with agro-waste and bio-based materials usually incurs technical questions regarding scalability, industrial production, standardization, fireproofing, and mechanical strength. Exploring this data is where Willow Technologies situates itself, but peculiarly through the lens of developing regions in West Africa. Through comprehensive works with coconuts, moringa, rice, and other indigenous crops, Lokko’s practice has been able to investigate and catalog the material character of various crops, their possible by-products, local transformation techniques, and the prospect and challenges of scalability as building materials.

+ 9