ecoLogicStudio, the pioneering biodesign firm founded in London by Prof. Claudia Pasquero and Dr. Marco Poletto, with its academic partners at Innsbruck University and the Bartlett UCL, presents DeepForest³, a visionary installation for the ‘"We the Bacteria. Notes Toward Biotic Architecture"’ exhibition curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley as part of the 24th International Exposition of La Triennale di Milano, which this year is focused on ‘Inequalities' under the presidency of Stefano Boeri. The installation will be open to the public from the 12 of May 2025.
DeepForest³ reimagines domesticity through microbial architectures. Blurring the boundaries between natural and synthetic environments, the installation envisions a cosy domestic space whose walls and floor are trees and roots, integrating microbial intelligence in a living, permeable architectural ecosystem.
Drawing from Italy’s history of landscape transformations—from the Navigli canal system in Milano to the drainage of the Pontine Marshes—DeepForest³ juxtaposes the resilience of microbial systems to historical attempts to dominate nature, highlighting both their vitality and the risks of socio-political instrumentalization.
Exclusively for the Triennale di Milano, DeepForest³ re-imagines its predecessor at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Deep.Forest, 2024). The former framed architecture as a synthetic forest, while this new iteration compresses the forest into an intimate domestic scale, envisioning the very idea of home as a living, microbial ecosystem.
“We are now more and more aware that our own nature is cyborgian and collective, and that our own identities extend far beyond the limits of our bodies. We are microbial ecosystems, we are algorithmic networks. It is a necessary consequence that our home becomes an extension of these ecosystems and networks. Our home is our microbiome.” - Prof. Claudia Pasquero
In DeepForest³, the forest does not surround the dwelling; it becomes itself the dwelling or a place to dwell. The floor is an engraved infrastructure, the walls are a mycelial forest and the air is filtered by photosynthetic organisms that provide nutritious biomass.
At the centre of the installation are three types of architectural components:
1. Photosynthesizers, filled with 50 liters of living cyanobacteria, actively capture CO₂ from the gallery environment and convert it into oxygen and biomass. These glass vessels are arranged to form a breathable membrane, both wall and filter, alive with metabolic activity.
2. Biodegraders, built from 3D-printed bark-like shells made of algae biopolymers, host living mycelium networks. These fungi feed on spent coffee grounds, a readily available urban waste, and grow into dense, fibrous forms that line the space like living insulation—mimicking salvaged birch trunks but grown from synthetic matter.
3. Carbon storers, such as reclaimed wood elements and active lichen colonies, integrate with these systems to stabilize and reframe the aesthetics of waste as beauty—turning the byproducts of decay into architectural ornament.
“The installation wishes to celebrate the first time microbial architecture enters the italian temple of design, the Milano Triennale. I think this is an epochal moment. For this reason we took great care in its design and detailing. DeepForest³ is really more than just a temporary installation, it delivers a fully functional and tangible biotechnological living system, grounded in the metabolic cycles of algae and fungi, but brought to life through bespoke digital design and unique material craftsmanship”. - Dr. Marco Poletto
What distinguishes DeepForest³ from many biomimetic design experiments is its design detailing. As a “domestic microbial laboratory,” it is explicitly designed to be inclusive and make biotechnological cultivation accessible to all, truly open source.
The systems that animate it, the bubbling algae, the growing mycelium, the integrated air and CO₂ pumps, are made visible and expressive, rather than concealed. The functional logic becomes the aesthetic logic. Technology becomes ornament, inviting users into an ongoing experiment in cyber-organic living.
Importantly, DeepForest³ doesn’t treat sustainability as an endpoint, it makes it a lifestyle interface. Algae can be easily harvested, diluted and grown in monthly cycles.
“The only way for design to tackle the issue of inequality is to facilitate healthy and sustainable lifestyle choices on a daily basis, and make these accessible to all. The design systems presented in DeepForest³, such as the AIReactor or the Zolla bench, strive to do just that.” -Prof. Claudia Pasquero
Zolla is a bench composed of a honeycomb cardboard base and modular cork blocks which serve as a breathable substrate for the cultivation of living mycelium cultures. As the mycelium colonizes the surface, it transforms the bench into a living system—its textures shifting, its scent evolving, and mushrooms gradually fruiting from its top layer. This process reveals the material intelligence of the bench: a porous, spongy terrain that is both architectural and biological. Zolla invites users to engage physically and sensorially with a piece of furniture that grows, breathes, and ultimately decays before a new culture is inoculated.
DeepForest³’s innovation lies not only in its material circularity, but in its cultural reframing: sustainability is no longer an invisible infrastructure of accounting platform. It is lived, sensed, and celebrated. In this context, domestic space is dedicated to form a renewed collaboration with nature, where intelligence is distributed across microbes, machines, and human minds alike, a vision for how our future homes may breathe, grow, and metabolise alongside us.
As part of the ongoing DeepForest series, this installation is the result of the collaboration between ecoLogicStudio and the Synthetic Landscape Lab at the University of Innsbruck, and continues their research into growing synthetic living architectural systems.
