Cellulose

Cellulose asks what a city could build from what it throws away. Where the Gießhof reads the ground as ore, Cellulose reads the organic waste of a block, kitchen scraps, garden cuttings and paper, as a fibre source. In the study a mobile mill the size of a shipping container turns that biomass into cellulose and the cellulose into three products: rope, paper tubes and a translucent membrane. The membrane is the building material. Robots stretch it over the gaps and courtyards of an existing block, span it as a roof between the fire walls of neighbouring houses and hang it as a curtain in front of a shop. Under it the block gains a second, brighter layer of rooms: greenhouse kitchens in which tomatoes grow beside the sink, lofts under a paper sky, rope nets on which children climb and neighbours sit, paper vaults over the courtyard. The old building keeps its bricks. It gains a lighter second body that can be spun again from the same bins when it wears out.

The material research behind the film began in the Synthetic Types studio in Stuttgart. Cellulose nanofibre films rival steel by weight and approach glass in transparency, and the feedstock exists in municipal quantities: green waste, food waste and waste paper are collected separately in every German city. What does not exist is the link between the bin and the building, a facility that turns mixed organic waste into an architectural membrane. The film pictures that missing link as a neighbourhood machine and the housing type it would produce. One limit of the material shapes the whole type: the membrane fears water, so it is always a roof or a wall and never a floor, and the floors are nets. Every image and the film are generated; nothing shown is built.