Living Materials are the Future of Green Building

Video description

The coming decades present a host of challenges for our built environments. To become more livable, cities will need to become smarter, with buildings, bridges, and infrastructure that are no longer static but dynamic; able to adapt and respond to what’s going on around them. If not exactly alive, these structures will need to be life-like, in important ways. And for that, they’ll need to incorporate living materials. The Convergence Center for Living Multifunctional Material Systems, a transatlantic research partnership between Penn State and the University of Freiburg in Germany, is focused on this emerging field. Working together and across disciplines, researchers from Penn State and Freiburg are applying living materials to the challenges of adaptive architecture.