BIOCRAFTSMANSHIP: Living Lights

BIOCRAFTSMANSHIP: Living Lights

Instructor: Rachel Armstrong
Researchers: Marie Melcore, Isil Yucel, Jannes Moons, Anna Vershinina, Rosie Broadhead, Zhongya Sun, Tria Amalia Ningsih, Mattie de Jonghe
Engagement: Craftsmanship / Open to students from Interior Architecture
Location: Ghent
Language / Taal: English
Semester: Semester 3, autumn 2026

Living Lights. The integration of energy, structure, flow, organisms and human interaction made visible through bioelectricity and the expressive qualities of light itself. Here, the CABLE installation produced by the RAAD studio materializes the concept of living electronics by drawing inspiration from cable bacteria—multicellular filaments capable of conducting electricity through deep sediment over centimeter-scale distances. The totem is composed of stacked, cylindrical multi-material modular units, each marked by vertical grooves that reference the microbial filament structure and trace a material lineage from the earth up to the biopolymer light at the apex in order to tell the spatial narrative of a microbial civilization. The structure is bioreceptive, with colonies of moss and algae nourished on the surface, mirroring the many electroactive bacteria that also cluster around this natural energy structure. The installation further demonstrates how light can be understood as a visible signature of metabolic exchange—where the wavelength, intensity, and diffusion of light become expressive of the living processes that generate it.

This iteration of the Biocraftsmanship studio reimagines the relationship between material, energy, metabolism, and human interaction within the built environment by using a bio-integrated lens to develop Living Lights. While exploring your design, you will work with researchers who are working with bioreceptivity, transilluminative materials, novel polymers, fabrics and advanced computation to examine how architectural elements (fittings and furnishings) can be transformed from passive objects into active, metabolic contributors to the home ‘economy.’

Yet the home does not exist in isolation; it is nested within the larger luminous ecology of the city. Ghent has long understood light as a fundamental material of the built environment, pioneering Belgium’s first architectural lighting plan in 1998—establishing a cohesive design for illuminating streets, squares, monuments, and iconic buildings. This surprisingly recent milestone emphasises how our conception of light in architecture is itself evolving while drawing attention to architectural details, creating ambience, and lending identity to public spaces. In 2011 the Ghent Light Festival brought light installations into direct dialogue with the urban fabric, inviting participation from residents, students, and artists—where light became both a functional infrastructure and a medium for wonder, storytelling, and collective experience.

Ghent’s Light Plan and the Light Festival directly inform our studio’s inquiry in several ways. They demonstrate the relationship between atmosphere and materiality, the integration of art and technology, the importance of local participation and co-creation, and a commitment to sustainability through energy-conscious design. These principles offer a transferrable model for how the home, too, can become a stage for luminous experience. Qualities such as discovery, temporal transformation, and the interplay of light and darkness translate equally from the urban scale to the intimate scale of the interior.

Venice offers a compelling counterpoint to the city of Ghent, where the high reflectivity of the canals transforms the city into a vast mirror. During the day light connects water and architecture, and shadows are as carefully composed as illumination. At night, the light is scattered so that forms seem to dissolve into one another. This ancient, vernacular luminosity is inseparable from the city’s material reality—a principle that lies at the very heart of our studio’s exploration of how metabolic materials might generate their own internal light. Students unable to travel to Venice will conduct a parallel Ghent-based urban survey that maps the interplay of light and shadow across the city’s streets, squares, and riverbanks, correlating materiality, light, and living systems. Both groups—Venice and Ghent—will share and exchange their findings, ensuring a combined knowledge base that enriches the entire studio.

Today, however, Ghent’s progressive lighting framework operates within a paradigm of energy consumption rather than metabolic generation. While the Light Festival actively seeks energy-efficient solutions—turning off public lighting where possible, using modern projectors with lower consumption, and minimizing waste—the studio asks: what might a lighting plan look like when light is not merely consumed but produced and metabolically generated? How might the principles of atmospheric lighting, co-creation, and sustainability that Ghent has pioneered at the urban scale be reimagined at the scale of the home—where lighting is powered by the living systems embedded within the very fittings and furnishings that surround us? And how might the material wisdom of Venice—where light appears to emerge from the substance of the city itself—inform a new approach to domestic lighting, where luminosity is grown, transmitted, and metabolically expressed?

In this studio, students will design lighting and furniture systems that transcend their conventional functions through two complementary and equally valid trajectories. One path works with bioreceptive materials and cultivates simple plants like moss and algae as integral parts of their structure, embedding a metabolic garden within the designed elements that performs ecological roles such as air purification and humidity regulation. The other path explores the transillumination of novel organic materials—such as salt-based polymers and other light-interactive substrates—investigating how light travels through, bends within, and is transformed by materiality as a direct expression of metabolic activity, modulating light quality, atmosphere, and energetic flow. Here, different wavelengths of light become visible markers of energetic transformation, revealing the otherwise invisible flows of metabolism through the spatial environment. Both trajectories will be integrated with their own power system—whether bioelectrically generated or transmitted through advanced material substrates—to become Living Lights. Whether your focus is on cultivating photosynthetic organisms or on making metabolic energy visible through the interplay of light and material, both approaches converge on a shared inquiry: how can the luminous environment of the home become a living expression of ecological process?

The ambition is to create a seamless integration of nature, material, organism, light, energy, and human presence, where rituals of care, responsibility, and stewardship become central to the design process. The studio is guided by the principles of Regenerative Architecture, which positions human presence as restorative for planetary health. You are invited to explore an architectural practice that collaborates across many different kinds of communities—human and non-human alike. In doing so, we build upon—and fundamentally challenge—the very notion of what an architectural lighting plan can be, shifting from energy consumption to ecological cultivation , while drawing inspiration from cities that have already shown us that light can be art, that it can belong to everyone, that it can emerge from material itself, and that its magic lies as much in how we experience it as in how we produce it.

Venice: Daytime reflection.

Venice. Crossing a bridge at night.

Line of Inquiry:

Reflecting Craftsmanship
Material Reality
Topic / Thematic Focus / Thema: Bio-integrated Design, Domestic Ecologies, Microbial Lighting, Transilluminative Materials, Non-Fossil Fuel Energy, Light as Metabolic Expression, Ecological stewardship and Care

Key Questions or Provocation:

How can an understanding of the ‘oikos’ lead to a reconceptualisation of how energy (bioelectricity, light) and resources (including organic household waste) comprise a building’s metabolic ecosystem?
In what ways can life-promoting fittings and furniture contribute to the value of these metabolic systems to enhance the overall health and well-being of people and organisms within a domestic space?
How can we design objects where nature, material, light, and the rituals of human care are completely seamless?
How can the transmission of light through novel materials make visible the otherwise invisible flows of metabolic energy within a space?
How does the interplay between light and materiality—through refraction, diffusion, and colour—become an expressive language for ecological vitality?
What does it mean to design for stewardship and responsibility in the context of a “living” artefact?
How can the principles of bioreceptivity be translated from the city scale (Venice) to inform the more intimate scale of home design? And how might the study of light in these contexts—both natural and artificial—inform a new material sensibility?
How might Ghent’s pioneering architectural lighting plan be reimagined through the lens of metabolic generation rather than energy consumption? What would it mean for a home or a city’s luminous identity to emerge from living systems?

Methodologies or Formats / Methodologie:

The studio unfolds through an integrated research and design process:

Biomaterial Experiments: Prototyping with bioreceptive substrates (e.g., porous ceramics, biopolymers, modified concretes) to host and cultivate algae/moss communities AND/OR prototyping with transilluminative organic materials (e.g., salt-based polymers, bio-derived films) to study light transmission, wavelength alteration, and material responsiveness to energy flow.
Living Prototyping: Designing and constructing a functional 1:1 scale prototype of a “living light” element (fitting, furnishing) that integrates either algae/moss cultivation with a microbial-powered lighting system or a transilluminative material system that makes metabolic energy visible through the quality, colour, and diffusion of transmitted
Fieldwork & Data Exchange: An optional field trip to Venice is organized for mid/late October 2026. This excursion will include a study visit to the Venice (Art) Biennale, which is designed to enhance research and reinforce team collaboration, as well as providing critical engagement with cutting-edge art and design. Students will study algal biofilms on Venetian building surfaces and observe how natural light interacts with material surfaces in the urban fabric, and visit TAMAssociati’s studio to explore their bioclimatic and socially engaged designs that will provide inspiration and context for the studio designs. Alternative Ghent Activity: For students unable to attend the Venice trip, an alternative activity will be organized in Ghent, with specific engagement with the Ghent Light Festival. This will involve a riverside bioreceptivity survey along the Leie River and/or a study of light conditions and material riverbank interactions, where students will document local algal and microbial colonization patterns as well as light-quality data on built structures. Data Sharing: Both groups will share and exchange their findings (visual documentation, material analysis, ecological data, light measurements) ensuring that all students benefit from a combined knowledge base.
Manifesto & Documentation: Developing a personal manifesto on bio-craftsmanship and design, alongside a reflection document outlining research methods, design processes, and the ethics of care for living systems and the expressive potential of light as a metabolic language.

Design / Expected Outcome(s):

Students will develop a spatial intervention that integrates a “living light” into a domestic or inhabited building context. The final design will be an architectural/spatial proposal (drawings, models) accompanied by a 1:1 functional prototype of a living lighting system. The design must demonstrate a complete integration of form, material, organism or light-transmissive substrate, and user, emphasizing the ecological performance and/or the luminous expressiveness and the rituals of care required to sustain it. Whether the prototype grows photosynthetic life on its surface or transmits metabolic energy through its material body, each project must make visible—through light itself—the living processes that animate the home. The work will reflect a shift from extraction and consumption to cultivation and regeneration.

Deliverables:

Final Architectural Project – A comprehensive design for a domestic interior fitting or furniture that incorporates the living light system.
1:1 Living Light Prototype – A functional prototype of either a microbial-powered lighting system integrated with a cultivated algae community on a bioreceptive substrate, OR a transilluminative material system that renders metabolic energy visible through the quality, wavelength, and diffusion of transmitted light.
Bio-Craftsmanship Manifesto – A personal ethical and technical framework for regenerative and bio-integrated design that articulates your position on the relationship between light, material, and metabolism.
Reflection Document – A critical review of research methods, co-design processes, and the challenges of designing for and caring for a living system or for designing with materials whose luminous behaviour is itself an expression of energetic

(Optional Venice field study: October 2026 | €650–850 estimated cost)