It sounds like something out of a Dario Argento film: soaring architecture built with fresh blood and sand. It’s no camp horror movie, though--rather, it’s an award-winning proposal from recent architecture school graduate Jack Munro.
“Animal blood is one of the most prolific waste materials in the world,” says Munro, a 2012 graduate of University of Westminster in London. “The blood drained from animal carcasses is generally thrown away or incinerated despite being a potentially useful product.”
In his final semester, Munro carried out an exhaustive study testing his hypothesis--that animal blood could be used in construction in underdeveloped areas where traditional building materials are scarce.
A single cow can produce about eight gallons of blood after it’s been slaughtered. Munro collected blood from four cows for his early tests, adding an antibacterial agent to stave off fungal growth and mixing it with sand. Then, he poured the mixture into a simple formwork and baked it at a fairly low temperature--only 160 degrees. He found that after only an hour of baking, the blood proteins coagulate to form a strong insoluble mass, bonding with the sand. He experimented with making glue first, then moved on to bricks. Compression testing suggests that he hasn’t hit on a concoction that produces a super strong brick, but they are waterproof, a major strength in areas where erosion is an issue.
Munro imagines the bricks in use in arid climates, like the Middle East, where mud bricks are typically used. For his thesis, he presented a design for a brick-making community in Siwa, Egypt, that “seeks to re-establish the autonomy of desert by using the waste blood from halal animal slaughter to create building materials.” Siwa’s agriculture industry has been decimated by changes in the Saharan desert, encroaching upon arable land. Brick-making could offer an alternative income to residents.
Munro’s building contains all parts of the production process: cattle sheds, slaughterhouse, and brick manufacturing facilities. “The building itself is formed by casting animal-blood-based adhesive over a sand dune and allowing the dune to migrate,” he explains, “revealing an interior space that can be excavated and occupied.”
“I believe there is certainly a potential for the real-world application of the techniques developed in the project,” Munro tells Co.Design over email. Right now, he’s looking to raise funds for a prototype single-story home built with his bricks in Siwa.
It all adds up to a strong and convincing concept. A weak point, of course, is how occupants will react to the taboo of living in houses built with blood. Then again, most of the general population is a-OK with the multitude of animal by-products used in everyday products. And at least in Munro’s case, he’s actually upcycling a product that would otherwise go to waste.
Speaking of insect architecture, a French company called Nidaplast uses honeycomb grids to solve problems both large and small. For 25 years they've been extruding polypropylene into a shape bees would recognize, and have been creating products that capitalize on the honeycomb's key quality: It's strong as heck.
In this quick, 30-second (non-English-language) vid, you can see workers laying down large blocks that are light enough for just two of them to lift—yet are strong enough to support the weight of cars and trucks.
These blocks, called Nidaplast EP, are 95% air. They're also an intelligent solution for road drainage: By digging a channel beneath the roadway and filling it with the blocks, you now have a massive void that can soak up a ton of water and slowly disperse it into the soil below. No more flooding.
the taiwanese designer employs the use of bamboo in the construction of his furniture and interior projects, offering contemporary takes on classic forms of chinese furniture typical of the ming and qing dynasties.
Automakers have a strong interest in understanding and improving the fuel market. After all, without a stable fuel infrastructure in place, their products (the cars they build) are nothing more than big sculptures. So it's not surprising that Audi is involved in a carbon-neutral fuel called e-gas.
Working with an organic waste burning facility, CO2 is captured and then combined with electrolytically produced hydrogen (powered by clean energy sources like wind and solar) to create synthetic methane (which is natural gas). To use this fuel, Audi is building a dual-fuel car called the Audi A3 TCNG which can use either the e-gas or regular gasoline. The feedstock is non-food organic waste, to avoid competition between food and fuel. In addition to the e-gas, Audi is also producing e-diesel and e-ethanol, to provide cleaner fuels for the entire range of its engines.
This is not too different from any number of other biofuel manufacturers. And this is not the first time that an automaker has taken an interest in fuel manufacturing. (GM was an investor in Coskata, a biofuel startup that got a lot of attention in 2008.) The issue with this, and other, biofuel schemes is to make the entire process carbon neutral. Not only the fuel itself, but also the energy used in producing the fuel must all be clean or carbon neutral in order to be sustainable in the long term.
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