Building Metabolism
Recipes for Food and Resource Cycles
Book published by Actar Publishers, 2026
Building Metabolism challenges architects, planners, and environmental designers to rethink planetary food systems along with architecture's expressive capacity to metabolize, digest, and generate resources. In many ways, we metabolize the planet, and the planet in turn becomes the repository of our excretions. This reciprocal, primordial, and interdependent relationship is mediated through architecture: the site where bodies are housed, resources are consumed and decomposed, and exchanges between micro and macro climates are registered.
The book is organized around two interconnected scales of habitation: the Metabolic Home, a stage set for domestic occupation, and the Planetary Home. The home and the planet are examined as living experiments, where humans and other species, processes of ingestion and excretion, and the material resources of space and territory become entangled components of a larger metabolic system. The contents are further divided into everyday domestic programs connected to metabolic processes, each exhibiting a “project narrative” as an actionable prototype, essays and “cookbooks,” as design propositions related to metabolic processes and food.
What we ingest and excrete—what we leak—is both a material and political act. Inputs and outputs from human bodies, more-than-human bodies, and buildings are not passive residues, but active agents within ecological assemblages. They participate in shaping environments, moods, cognition, energy flows, and political capacities.
