2024 CCA/UCSF team wins Outstanding Science Award at BioDesign Challenge

CCA Architecture team, in collaboration with UCSF students and faculty, has won the Outstanding Science award at the 2024 BioDesign Challenge in New York. This remarkable achievement marks the second consecutive year the team has received this honor. The award-winning project, "Shell We Dance?", explores innovative solutions for transforming egg and shellfish waste into sustainable building materials. The project team, led by Margaret Ikeda, Evan Jones, Negar Kalantar, and Dyche Mullins worked at Autodesk's Pier 9 Technology Center through our Academic Alliance. The project tackles the pressing issue of construction waste and carbon emissions by drawing inspiration from natural shell structures. By developing moldable components and a complementary adhesive, the team created a new building system that incorporates living bacteria to enhance structural capacity. This sustainable approach aligns with the vision of reducing the environmental impact of the construction industry.
Team Members:

  • CCA Students: Miti Mehta, Negar Hosseini, Kianoush Hamedi, Jesus Guillermo Macias Franco

  • Project Leads: Margaret Ikeda, Evan Jones, Dr. Negar Kalantar, Dr. Dyche Mullins

  • UCSF Students: Alex Hong, Claire Kokontis, Camille Moore

  • Advisors: Ali Farajmandi, Dr. Anastasia H. Muliana, Dr.Alain Goriely, Dr. Gabor Domokos

Project Highlights:

  1. Inspiration from Nature: The team was inspired by the complex structures of natural shells and aimed to replicate these forms sustainably.

  2. Environmental Impact: The project addresses the high carbon emissions of the construction industry by utilizing egg and shellfish waste, materials that are typically discarded in large quantities.

  3. Interdisciplinary Collaboration: The project exemplifies the power of interdisciplinary research, bringing together architectural designers, cellular biologists, material scientists, applied geometric modeling mathematicians, and fabricators.

  4. Innovative Material Development: By experimenting with binding agents like gelatin and potato starch, the team created a robust, repeatable bio-material. The addition of living bacteria further strengthened the material, achieving a strength comparable to cork and rubber.

  5. Modular Building System: Inspired by mathematical principles and natural aggregation patterns, the team developed a modular system that can be scaled up to building blocks

Biodesign presentation at New York City June 13

Margaret Ikeda and Evan Jones of AEL, and Negar Kalantar of DCL will be accompanying their cross collaborative team from CCA’s architecture division and UCSF’s microbiology department. CCA students Negar Hosseini, Miti Chetan Mehta, Jesus Guillermo Macias Franco and Kianoush Hamedi worked with UCSF students Claire Kokontis, Alex Hong, and Camille Moore on the entry “Shell we dance”. The project created biomaterial our of shellfish and eggshell waste. Taught with Professor from UCSF (Dyche Mullins), the team was assisted and advised from advanced mathematic professors Alain Goriely (Oxford University) and Gábor Domokos (Budapest University of Technology and Economics) and Ali Farajmandi (graduate of CCA’s MAAD program).

Marcus, Ikeda and Jones Publish Essay in POOL Journal

Adam Marcus, Margaret Ikeda, and Evan Jones recently published the essay “Floating With: Buoyant Ecologies of Collaboration and Solidarity” in POOL, the student magazine of the Department of Architecture & Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles. The POOL editors invited the AEL to reflect on the Buoyant Ecologies project for the journal’s latest issue, FLOAT. The essay positions the Buoyant Ecologies research in opposition to and in critique of Seasteading and other libertarian visions of colonizing the ocean as a site for extractive, neoliberal capitalism. Instead, this work embraces Donna Haraway’s notion of sympoiesis and “making-with,” advocating a communal and collaborative relationship with the ocean as a site for interspecies exchange, interaction, and mutual resilience.