Emily Young, Visiting Assistant Professor, and David Paraschiv, alumnus, of the School of Architecture (SoA) have collaborated with Terreform ONE to design an installation for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.
The installation, titled “Coding Plants: A Sustainable Artificial Reef and Living Kelp Archive for the Ocean,” will be featured in the main Arsenale space from May 10 to November 23, 2025.
The project proposes a speculative future where libraries are grown, not built. Botanical elements are genetically augmented to store knowledge of architectural forms, which can be extracted and used to challenge polluting construction methods.
The goal is to design urban environments that adapt and evolve in balance with their ecosystems. Plants function as living archives, encoding information within their DNA to allow users to influence growth and structure.
This approach integrates radical sustainability into a semi-natural ecosystem, creating a harmonious blend of hybrid nature and human innovation. The synthetic living reef preserves design knowledge, with a single gram of plant DNA capable of storing up to 215 million gigabytes of data.
