In Italy, the Living Architecture project prototypes are gaining traction as an alternative living space where natural resources are incorporated into daily living. A “Living Brick” exhibition in the United Kingdom shows the latest prototype which includes a freestanding, next-generation, selectively programmable series of bioreactors that are installed in an interior space of a building, as a “living wall.”
According to The Ecologist, “This wall is composed of three different kinds of ‘living’ building blocks – microbial fuel cell, algae bioreactor and genetically modified processors. These are separated by semi permeable membranes. The whole structure is ‘fed’ with grey water which carries as a supply of nutrients, and also provides a growth medium for the respective microbial consortia that produce a range of substrates such as biomass. For the first time, it brought together the structural integrity of a traditional building block and material and conferred it with the metabolic capacity of a microbial fuel cell, which can turn waste organic material into electricity, water and oxygen.”