How Terreform ONE's pioneering designers envision a post-pandemic world

Recently, I had the opportunity to facilitate an online conversation with Terreform ONE, a Brooklyn, New York-based nonprofit architecture and urban design research group whose humble mission is "to combat the extinction of planetary species through pioneering acts of design."

It was a refreshing jolt of inspiration and hopefulness during this otherwise dreary moment.

The conversation was hosted by the San Francisco-based Museum of Craft and Design, which recently housed an exhibition titled "Survival Architecture and the Art of Resilience," in which visionary architects and artists were asked to create artistically interpretative solutions and prototypes for survival shelter in a warming world. (My wife, Randy Rosenberg, executive director of the nonprofit Art Works for Change, created the exhibition, which has traveled North America the past few years.)

As part of the exhibition, Art Works for Change commissioned Terreform ONE (for Open Network Ecology) to create Cricket Shelter Farm, an innovative living space that addresses both sustainable food systems and modular compact architecture. Essentially, it is housing that also serves as a cricket farm and, hence, a source of food for its human residents. Each of the hundreds of off-the-shelf plastic containers that form the main structure house a self-contained colony of crickets, which can be turned into high-protein flour. A typical shelter might have 300 such units, each producing a bag of "chirp chips," or the ingredients for making such things as bagels or pasta, every few weeks.

"They live happy lives and they reproduce," explained Mitchell Joachim, Terreform ONE’s co-founder, of the tiny, six-legged critters.

In a world with more than a billion undernourished souls, not to mention as many as 1.6 billion homeless, solutions such as this can be global game-changers.

That may sound fanciful — and, for some, less than appetizing — but insect consumption is hardly a novel concept, according to a 2013 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report. "From ants to beetle larvae — eaten by tribes in Africa and Australia as part of their subsistence diets — to the popular, crispy-fried locusts and beetles enjoyed in Thailand, it is estimated that insect-eating is practiced regularly by at least 2 billion people worldwide," FAO said. Some 80 percent of the world's nations eat insects in some form.

And because you can produce a gram of cricket protein using a tiny fraction of the land, water and other resources it takes to produce a gram of animal protein, it represents a vast ecological improvement compared to eating meat from cows, chickens, lambs and pigs.

In a world with more than a billion undernourished souls, not to mention as many as 1.6 billion homeless, solutions such as this can be global game-changers.

Bikes, buildings and butterflies

Cricket Shelter Farm is just one of Terreform ONE’s innovative solutions.

There’s Gen2Seat, "the first full-scale synthetic biological chair," created by fusing mycelium — the vegetative part of a fungus, and the foundation for mushrooms — with bacteria to create a biobased polymer. "It's designed for kindergartens, and she's supposed to go home and tell mommy and daddy that she can eat her chair and that it's OK," said Joachim, a Harvard- and MIT-educated architect, Fulbright Scholar and TED Fellow, whose daughter is pictured here, modeling the chair.

Another is the Plug-In Ecology: Urban Farm Pod, a habitat "for individuals and urban nuclear families to grow and provide for their daily vegetable needs."

As Joachim explained: "Instead of a green wall, it's a green ball for your home or your rooftop or your urban balcony or an urban park. You make food on the outside and the inside. It's on wheels, so it can rotate to get the most amount of solar income." An app tells you when the veggies are ready to pick.

And then there’s the Monarch Sanctuary, a prototype building fa?ade that serves as a habitat for the butterfly of that name, an iconic pollinator species that is considered endangered. It’s a regular building on the inside but the skin of the building doubles as a "vertical butterfly meadow." Terreform ONE teamed with BASF to launch a Monarch Sanctuary installation at the Morris Museum. A planned eight-story building in New York City’s Nolita neighborhood will be the first full-scale version.

In addition to BASF, Terreform also has worked with Intel and GE. "These big partners are very much interested in sharing these concepts so they can move on their side of things to make some of them happen," said Terreform Executive Director Vivian Kuan, an architect with an interdisciplinary background in art, entrepreneurial marketing and startups.

Quotidian, everyday folks

One thing I truly appreciate about Terreform’s approach is its attention to the social aspect of these innovative designs.

"I think a lot of the future depends on creating access and implementing these programs and making them rely on the collaboration of many different stakeholders — public-private partnerships, where cities and corporations really jump in and help the funding; and where inventors and entrepreneurs develop the technology and pilot," Kuan said.

Joachim pointed to a shared-bicycle concept being incubated at Terreform —"a super accessible bike-sharing program along with a biodiversity program,” as he described it.

"This is essentially meant for people who can't even afford something like Citi Bike" — the privately owned public bicycle sharing system serving New York City. "It gives them access and they can use it to solve what we call the last-mile problem, which is a very difficult thing in cities. You can get buses and subways to a certain area, but then you can't get that bag of groceries from that last stop on the subway to your home." The low-cost cargo bikes are designed to carry up to 400 pounds.

"We are working deeply to think about mobility justice in every possible form," Joachim added. "So, none of this is imagined for the 1 percent or the super-elite. It's imagined for the quotidian folks and the everyday people in cities, especially dense, intense urban environments."

In this topsy-turvy time, even the most fanciful ideas suddenly seem possible as we rethink cities, suburbs, buildings, work, home, shopping and practically everything else. Joachim and Kuan believe the pandemic could cause a massive shift in how people think about living in dense urban environments — or, instead, move to the ‘burbs. Either way, the times will require new designs for buildings, infrastructure and ways of moving about.

Indeed, Joachim said, this may be Terreform’s moment. "We were waiting for a crisis, because we thought that was the only way we're going to get any kind of change happening."

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