Living Room Collective: Picoplanktonics

The Canada Council for the Arts, commissioner of Canada’s participation in the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, presents Picoplanktonics by the Living Room Collective.

Amidst the ongoing global climate crisis, the Living Room Collective has developed a ground-breaking exhibition that showcases the potential for collaboration between humans and nature. Comprised of 3D printed structures that contain live cyanobacteria capable of carbon sequestration, Picoplanktonics is an exploration of our potential to co-operate with living systems by co-constructing spaces that remediate the planet rather than exploit it.

The Living Room Collective’s exhibition is the culmination of four years of collaborative research by Andrea Shin Ling and various interdisciplinary contributors. It is focused on harnessing the design principles of living systems to develop sustainable, intelligent and resilient materials and technologies for the future.  By leveraging ancient biological processes alongside emergent technologies, it proposes designing environments under an ecology-first ethos.

When visitors enter the Canada Pavilion, they will encounter 3D printed structures that were originally fabricated in an ETH Zürich laboratory. These are the largest living material structures produced using a first-of-its-kind biofabrication platform capable of printing living structures at an architectural scale. The unique Picoplanktonics experience stems from adapting the Canada Pavilion to provide enough light, moisture, and warmth for the living cyanobacteria within the structures to grow, thrive and change. For the duration of the exhibition, caretakers will be onsite tending to the structures, emphasizing care and stewardship as essential elements of the design.

As global carbon emissions continue to rise to untenable levels, Picoplanktonics presents a vision of how a regenerative system of construction could operate. It is an ongoing experiment centered on leveraging the reciprocal relationship between living structures, the built environment, and humans. In this way, the Living Room Collective is rethinking building principles and prioritizing ecological resilience beyond human species survival.

“The Canada Council for the Arts is delighted to unveil Picoplanktonics by the Living Room Collective at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Through the lens of architecture, this year’s Canadian exhibition brings technological innovation and ecological stewardship together. It is a unique exhibition, sure to inspire global audiences and to ignite important conversations, about how our built environment might better house and use natural systems for a more sustainable future.” 
— Michelle Chawla, Director and CEO, Canada Council for the Arts

The Canada Council for the Arts is Canada’s public arts funder, with a mandate to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts. The Council champions and invests in artistic excellence through a broad range of grants, services, prizes and payments to professional Canadian artists and arts organizations. Its work ensures that unique, vibrant and diverse art and literature engages persons from across Canada, enriches their communities and reaches markets around the world. The Council also raises public awareness and appreciation of the arts through its communication, research and arts promotion activities.

"Picoplanktonics marks four years of research at ETH Zürich with international collaborators in material science, biology, robotics, and computational design. As we move these living prototypes into the Canada Pavilion, we are thrilled to invite the public into this open experiment and reveal all phases of the material’s life, including growth, sickness, and death, while collectively imagining a regenerative design approach that seeks planetary remediation.” 
— Andrea Shin Ling, Living Room Collective

The Living Room Collective is a group of architects, scientists, artists and educators who work at the intersection of architecture, biology and digital fabrication technologies—led by Canadian architect and biodesigner Andrea Shin Ling. Alongside core team members Nicholas Hoban, Vincent Hui and Clayton Lee, the collective seeks to move society away from exploitative systems of production to regenerative ones by inventing design methods and processes that center on natural systems. They see the Biennale Architettura 2025 as a platform to generate national and international conversations that ask: How does one fabricate a biological architecture? What are the conditions of stewardship? What are the strategies to instigate this at scale, regionally and globally?

Media contacts
Communications and Engagement, Canada Council for the Arts: media@canadacouncil.ca / Vincent Despins, TACT Conseil: vdespins@tactconseil.ca.