Constructive Land Berlin/Brandenburg with Material Cultures

In their BE-FELLOW project, Material Cultures built off the methodology of their ongoing research on sustainable forestry and regenerative land management in the UK, Constructive Land. Their project “Constructive Land Berlin/Brandenburg” investigated the potential of rewetting peatlands in Brandenburg for the production of regional biobased building materials. The project represents the experimental transfer of the previously developed methods to a new political, climatic, and cultural context: from the North-East and Yorkshire in the UK to Berlin and Brandenburg. This transfer reveals universal and specific properties of the methodology and tests its suitability for use in different contexts.

Material Cultures is a not-for-profit organization founded to bring together design, material research, and high-level strategic thinking to make meaningful progress towards a post-carbon built environment. They work at the intersection of architectural design, engineering, systems thinking, digital technologies, and material science, with a focus on regenerative material sourcing and circular economies.

Material Cultures investigates how material and industrial cultures shape the world. They challenge the regulations, supply chains, and processes that to a large extent dictate how the buildings we inhabit are made, function, and feel. Their projects engage with the barriers to change, from land-use and policy constraints to technical and material challenges in supply chains and onsite. 

Through their work, they have demonstrated that low embodied carbon, local materials can be more affordable and durable than globally-sourced, petrochemical-derivative ones, and are capable of comfortably meeting and outperforming industry standards.

The first phase of the fellowship resulted in a research report “Wetlands and Construction: An Opportunity for Berlin-Brandenburg” that examined the problem of drained peatlands and the potential of rewetting them. The report found that well-planned peatland restoration can not only mitigate current CO2 emissions, but can also produce a variety of building materials from perennial biomass. This includes plants such as reeds, sedges, reed canary grass, typha, willow, and alder wood.

During the second phase, a two-part prototype of 1:1 building fragments was built in the Bauhaus Earth Marienpark LAB using various paludiculture-based materials. By tangibly demonstrating the use of carbon-negative materials cultivated on rewetted peatlands, it aimed to promote peatland carbon capture and support a regional, bio-based building industry. The paludiculture “Fragment” was displayed at ‘The Great Repair’ exhibition by ARCH+ at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and ‘Kreis statt Krise’ exhibition by Cradle to Cradle NGO at Freiraum in Der Box, Berlin.