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Metropolis Magazine
Brick built the ancient citadels and hypocausts of the Indus Valley
and ornamented the Chrysler Building, that great monument to the machine
age. But in recent years, it has had a more sinister legacy:
environmental menace. Tossing a clay brick into a coal-powered kiln,
then firing it up to 2,000˚F, emits about 1.3 pounds of carbon dioxide.
Multiply that by the 1.23 trillion bricks manufactured each year, and
you’re talking about more pollution than what’s produced by all the
airplanes in the world. The winner of the 2010 Metropolis Next
Generation Design Competition proposes a radical alternative: don’t bake
the brick; grow it.
In a lab at the American University of Sharjah, in the United Arab
Emirates, Ginger Krieg Dosier, an assistant architecture professor,
sprouts building blocks from sand, common bacteria, calcium chloride,
and urea (yes, the stuff in your pee). The process, known as
microbial-induced calcite precipitation, or MICP, uses the microbes on
sand to bind the grains together like glue with a chain of chemical
reactions. The resulting mass resembles sandstone but, depending on how
it’s made, can reproduce the strength of fired-clay brick or even
marble. If Dosier’s biomanufactured masonry replaced each new brick on
the planet, it would reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by at least 800
million tons a year. “We’re running out of all of our energy sources,”
she said in March in a phone interview from the United Arab Emirates.
“Four hundred trees are burned to make 25,000 bricks. It’s a consumption
issue, and honestly, it’s starting to scare me.”
This year’s Next Generation competition asked entrants to invent a
“small (but brilliant and elegant) ‘fix’” for the designed environment.
Jurors saw space-saving clothes hangers and solar-powered window shades
and souped-up planters. Dosier’s bricks are certainly small—in lab tests
so far, about the size of a Lego—but with further research, their
impact could resonate all over the world. Consider the prospects in
countries like China and India, where outdated kilns put brick
production among the top coal consumers. “There was a strong feeling
among the judges that the award should go to someone dealing with an
issue on a global scale,” says Chris Sharples, a juror and a principal
of SHoP Architects. “Here was a very simple concept defined by
scientific method and an example of how you can come up with some very
innovative ways to solve basic problems.” Choosing it as the winner was,
he adds, a “no-brainer.” It was also a testament to the value of an
architect who knows her way around a microscope.
Dosier, 32 years old, isn’t the first to dabble at the crossroads of
microbiology and chemistry. In Precambrian times, bacteria created
geological formations through a process that scientists would only begin
simulating 3.45 billion years later, growing ground-firming minerals in
oil patches and contaminated soil. Nor is she alone in trying to green
the humble brick. Intrepid entrepreneurs have tamped everything from fly
ash and plant refuse to car tires and plastic bottles into a neat
little block and called it a brick (thoroughly peeving the brick
industry, which will tell you that anything short of clay and shale is
just a cheap imitation). Dosier’s act of alchemy was to apply science to
design. “There are thousands of examples of microbial mineral
precipitation in the scientific literature, but few if any of them have
been explored for use in fabrication of construction or design
materials,” Grant Ferris, a geology professor at the University of
Toronto, who conducted early MICP studies, writes in an e-mail. “This is
what makes Professor Dosier’s work so compelling. Bioremediation and
industrial applications look out!”
The first lines of Dosier’s résumé would hardly peg her for a chemistry
nerd: an undergraduate degree in interior architecture from Auburn; a
semester at Rural Studio under Sam Mockbee, who sermonized,
Messiah-like, about “architecture as kindness”; a master’s in
architecture at Cranbrook, the free-flowing essence of everything hard
science isn’t. Just before graduate school, Dosier threw away her
worldly possessions—her clothes, her typewriting tables, her precious
antique glassware. In retrospect, it’s when much of her thinking about
materials in design took shape. “I was questioning this idea of
ownership, and I got really interested in chemical processes,
researching what materials are made of, what you can add to them to
change how they grow and die,” she says. Soon, she was building
furniture out of salt and calcium carbonate (a compound found in
shells), then watching it evaporate in the forest like an Andy
Goldsworthy sculpture. Her master’s thesis, a salt-composite handrail,
cleaned germs off anyone who touched it, before wearing away to a flimsy
scaffold. “I wanted to show,” she says, “that architecture can do more
than just exist.”
To develop her ideas further, she needed a firmer grasp of the
technology. So she did what any aspiring scientist would have done: she
headed to the toy store and bought crystal-growing kits. Lots of them.
“My favorite was a crystal-geode kit, where you seeded plaster of Paris
with crystals and placed it in an aqueous solution of crystal-growth
media,” she says. The kits taught her invaluable chemistry basics: keep
your solution wet (otherwise nothing will grow) but not too wet
(otherwise nothing will grow), and keep the room cool (otherwise nothing
will grow) but not too cool (otherwise nothing will grow). And so on.
This informal education continued apace at North Carolina State
University, where she landed a visiting professorship in 2005. She
audited classes on materials science and pored over books like Bio-mineralization:
Progress in Biology, Molecular Biology and Application. By then,
she had familiarized herself with research on growing solids for
industrial uses and knew she wanted to adapt it for architecture. She
sought out mentors, including the microbiologist José Bruno-Bárcena, who
became, in matters of scientific inquiry, the Anne Sullivan to her
Helen Keller. “From an architecture–interior design background, I always
wanted to go big, and my experiments would fail 98 percent of the
time,” Dosier says. “I felt like I needed to buy Chemistry for Dummies.
He started opening the door of my mind on how to think.” Bruno-Bárcena
encouraged her to narrow her focus. When she announced she wanted to
grow brick via microbes in either waste mineral water or a porous
skeleton, he suggested she limit herself to the latter. Another mentor,
James Patrick Rand, an NCSU architecture professor, convinced her to
train her attention on developing basic bricks instead of more complex
building forms. Like Bruno-Bárcena, he saw value in simplicity.
All the while, she read: Introduction to Industrial Minerals; Microbial
Sediments; Biomineralization: Cell Biology and Mineral
Deposition. “Ginger is not at all fearful of the science of
construction materials,” Rand says. “She readily engages chemical
processes—things many architecture students and practitioners are afraid
of.”
It’s true: architects don’t do this sort of thing. In a great disservice
to themselves and their profession, they avoid science the way poets
avoid calculators. “Typically, architects are not involved in the
development of building products and sustainable technologies,” SHoP’s
Sharples says. “We rely on experts outside the field, so often these
green products are just applied directly to our designs.” Put another
way, when architects have a hand in producing new materials, they exert
more control over how buildings perform. That is Dosier’s coup.
Yet for all her toil, her first successful experiment was somewhat
accidental. At the University of Sharjah, where she moved in 2007 to
teach full-time, she spent two years trying to develop a brick with
different microbes, material proportions, and pH levels. Everything
failed.
(It didn’t help matters that the first bacteria cultures she bought from
India and the U.S. Department of Agriculture were duds.) Then one
afternoon, she threw together a bunch of scraps from some old, ill-fated
tests, for kicks. Practically forgetting about it, she revisited
experiment No. 112 a week later, only to discover that the medium had
transformed into a “baby brick,” as she tells it, a
four-by-two-by-one-centimeter proof of concept. “I was shocked to find
that it had worked,” she says, “and glad that I took detailed lab
notes.” The magic formula was in allowing the right concentration of
bacteria to fester just long enough.
The months since have been an exhaustive exercise in reproducing and
strengthening the results. She has repeated the combination more than 30
times, experimenting with assorted sand grains and aggregates, like
recycled glass. She has also explored various manufacturing techniques.
Traditional casting is the most obvious method, since it requires few
resources—formwork, sand, bacteria, and the calcium chloride–urea
solution, almost all of which is available locally, both in New York and
in the UAE. Rapid prototyping is another, decidedly less democratic
option. In the future, Dosier says, she’ll be able to program the
brick’s precise composition, then fabricate it layer by layer on a 3-D
printer. The technology poses countless design possibilities.
Ball-shaped bricks: Why not?
The future poses countless obstacles, too. She’ll have to figure out how
to create a strong brick without squandering raw materials, and how to
scale up for mass production given that the chemical process is
inherently slow. (Dosier’s blocks take a week to grow; clay bricks can
be made in two days.) But the most pressing hurdle is that the biobrick
pollutes. Microbial-induced calcite precipitation spews tremendous
amounts of ammonia, as scientists affiliated with Delft University of
Technology, in the Netherlands, discovered recently when they tried the
chemical process on contaminated sand and soil. “High ammonia
concentrations result in environmental eutrophication and eventually,
via microbial conversion to nitrate, the poisoning of groundwater,” the
Delft researcher Henk Jonkers writes in an e-mail. If the bacteria
continues to convert ammonia to nitrous oxide, he adds, it can produce a
greenhouse gas 320 times more powerful than CO2. “The results show that
working with natural processes is not necessarily equivalent to
sustainable practices!”
Dosier plans to capture emissions before they transform into noxious
gases. A closed-loop system would recycle waste back into the
brick-production cycle using organic buffers (carbon filters, for
example), though she acknowledges that it would require “collaborations
with additional researchers and scientists in various fields of
environmental study and industrial ecology.” (Crystal-growing kits can’t
do everything.) A regular designer would’ve bowed out of the game by
now. But Dosier, versed as she is in the methods of both science and
design, welcomes—and is perhaps ideally suited to overcome—the
challenge.
In the meantime, she dreams about actually putting the bricks to use.
She wants to field-test them on a large expanse of desert north of the
UAE–Saudi Arabia border, where Bedouins, the seminomadic tribes who
populate the Middle East’s sandy wilds, hitch their camels seasonally.
And a friend from Cranbrook, who works in humanitarian aid, invited
Dosier to join him in Ethiopia this summer to “get this material going.”
A rash of violence ahead of this month’s elections postponed the trip
indefinitely, but Dosier remains optimistic.
“Even if [Ethiopia] doesn’t work out, I can think of plenty of regions
here where I would like to work,” she says. “The lab is fun to work in.
But seeing if it could really happen? That for me is the whole deal.”
Maybe then, brick buildings will no longer be villains of the green age
but monuments to it.