I am a multidisciplinary design strategist and researcher with seven years of experience in the built environment, turning research on climate, material circularity, and emerging technology into regenerative spaces for all living things that depend on them.
I am a multidisciplinary design strategist and researcher with seven years of experience in the built environment, turning research on climate, material circularity, and emerging technology into regenerative spaces for all living things that depend on them.
Plant-Led Fabrication for Regenerative Structures
2024-2025
Hana Khurshid
Luke Fiorante
The Salata Institute for Climate & Sustainability
Rooted Intelligence is a speculative bio-materials research project that explores how cities might be rewilded by inviting living systems to actively participate in the design of urban environments. Through material research and prototyping, the project investigates how plant root networks can be choreographed through computational design and digitally fabricated scaffolds to form adaptive, evolving geometries.
Urban rewilding is often treated as add-on green surfaces layered onto systems that remain fundamentally inert and extractive. Cities lack frameworks that allow living systems to actively shape how environments evolve over time.
What if urban environments were conceived as open-ended systems designed to evolve through growth?
What if ecological agency were treated as an operative design parameter, rather than a constraint to be managed?
What if we shifted design from producing static outcomes to cultivating systems that evolve through biological growth over time?
This research prototypes a closed-loop, root-driven material system that evolves alongside ecological cycles .
The system establishes environmental gradients regulating airflow, moisture, and structural support, while allowing biological processes to determine outcomes over time.
This systems map charts a transition from static construction toward living material systems.
By aligning the material intelligence of root networks with conventional fabrication and joinery, it imagines ecosynthetic structures that grow through local ecologies, regenerative economies, and long-term systems of care.
How might cities be rewilded through systems that grow, regenerate, and adapt alongside urban ecologies?
As climate instability accelerates, they offer a model for biologically responsive construction systems that embed growth, decay, and care into spatial and material organization.
Computationally designed scaffolds where structure and biology co-evolve. Porosity and density tuned to guide root growth, moisture, and strength across the surface.
> Spatial Adaptation
Root systems adapted dynamically to scaffold orientation, negotiating gravity and moisture to form distinct spatial patterns.
> Ecological Time
How material openness and thickness regulate moisture, growth duration, and biological engagement.
> Seed Typologies
Different seed types generated distinct root architectures, influencing density, directionality, and interconnection.
The instron testing demonstrates that Root Reinforcement transforms structural behavior from a limited, brittle response into a high-capacity, energy-absorbing design.
While the reinforcement significantly increases ultimate strength across all geometries, it often trades off initial stiffness for vastly improved ductility and "toughness".
Max Force: 290N
Disp. At Peak: 1.4mm
Stiffness: High
Max Force: 660N
Disp. At Peak: 6.0mm
Stiffness: Low
Max Force: 3900N
Disp. At Peak: 3.9mm
Stiffness: Low
Max Force: 4600N
Disp. At Peak: 3.1mm
Stiffness: High
Max Force: 240N
Disp. At Peak: 3.4mm
Stiffness: Low Strain
Max Force: > 1300N
Disp. At Peak: > 8.6mm
Stiffness: Extremely Resilient
Root networks act as living joinery, forming fibrous connections that bridge gaps, coil along edges, and mechanically interlock adjacent modules. Guided by scaffold geometry and seed placement, roots have the ability to replace fasteners and adhesives with biological cohesion that strengthens over time.
When cultivated through computationally designed scaffolds, root systems can function as self-organizing structural agents. Their dense entanglement distributes tensile forces across the assembly, allowing roots to assume load-bearing and stabilizing roles as the scaffold biodegrades.
BVOH enables a temporary structural phase, dissolving into an agar–root biocomposite that transfers support to living material. This approach establishes a scalable framework for alternative biodegradable scaffolds such as chitin or mycelium to form various biocomposites.
Root-grown materials offer a viable pathway toward circular, biodegradable alternatives to synthetic composites, while generating ecological co-benefits such as microhabitat formation, air filtration, and localized microclimate regulation.
This research explores how such systems could scale into architectural elements, think fencing, façade modules, or shading structures, that reintroduce living matter into urban environments while remaining fully biodegradable at end of life.
Designing the initial conditions rather than the final form.
Encoding porosity, hydration, gravity, and light as primary design parameters.
Choreographing tensile capacity through growth, not mechanical force
Positioning multi-species root systems as co-authors of structure.
Leveraging tropisms to drive adaptive thickening, clustering, and spatial entanglement.
Reframing maintenance as ongoing ecological care and guided emergence.
Scripting decay as a material transition, not a defect.
Embedding nutrient return and biodegradability into architectural lifecycles.
Shifting from extractive construction toward living systems that leave soil, microclimate, and biodiversity improved over time.