March 12, 2026

At Penn Farm, Modeling the Future of Sustainable Architecture

By Matt Shaw

Group of students and staff in snowy landscape with Penn Pavilion in background

As part of Laia Mogas-Soldevila’s Fall 2025 Inquiry into Biomaterial Architectures seminar, Penn Farm was an outdoor laboratory for testing architectural elements fabricated from biomaterials. In December, Mogas-Soldevila was joined there by Teaching Assistant Yasaman Amirzehni and collaborators including Penn Enviornmental Innovation Initiatives Director Katherine Unger Baillie; Penn Farm’s Lila Bhide, Emylee Fleshman, and Ezra Tischler; PennPraxis Research Associate Elliot Bullen; and Doris Wagner, DiMaura Professor of Biology and director of the Penn Plant Adaptability and Resilience Center.

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Next to the elevated railway in a secluded corner of University City, Penn Farm is a green oasis where students learn about organic farming, food justice, and sustainable agriculture on a quarter-acre of regenerative gardens. An initiative of Wellness at Penn, the farm is a place where students and faculty from many departments and disciplines come together around these topics—and now we can add sustainable architecture to the list.

Last fall, Penn Farm turned to DumoLab, a research laboratory led by Assistant Professor of Architecture Laia Mogas-Soldevila, and PennPraxis, the applied research and community engagement arm of the Weitzman School, for some much-needed shelters and furniture. Mogas-Soldevila responded by designing and fabricating them using plant waste, with help from Yasaman Amirhzehni, a senior DumoLab researcher who earned her MSD-AAD at Weitzman, and the 18 graduate MArch, MSD-RAS and MSD-EBD students enrolled in the Inquiry into Biomaterial Architectures elective seminar.

Mogas-Soldevila, who has exhibited DumoLab’s work at the Venice Architecture Biennale and elswhere, has an international following for her use of biomaterials in architecture. So when Penn Farm asked for help building an outdoor classroom, she welcomed the opportunity. The design features shingles made from the non-food plant materials generated on site, such as stems and leaves from okra, sweet peas, eggplant, and sorghum. “It’s clad with materials the farm produces, so as an educational outdoor classroom, it makes a lot of sense,” says Mogas-Soldevila.

Illuminated pavilion at night next to railway — A proposed outdoor classroom designed for Penn Farm by DumoLab and students enrolled in Mogas-Soldevila’s Inquiry into Biomaterial Architectures seminar would be built largely with biomaterials. The rendering was produced by students on the Agri Cell team.

The farm’s request was for students to pilot materials that could eventually be used in constructing shade or furniture for an outdoor classroom. Students responded with wood structures clad in shingles, fabric panels, bio-receptive tiles, a cassette system in a grid, seating and table surfaces. All are made from biomass collected at the farm and some incorporate food waste generated by Penn Dining’s operations—including roots, stems, and peels—illustrating the possibilities of a circular economy that is also hyperlocal.

But, as Mogas-Soldevila knows well, bringing biomaterials to the building and construction market presents many challenges. The materials present entirely new properties such as shrinkage rates an they change color over time. “These bio-based architectures need a new set of skills and hypotheses,” Mogas-Soldevila says. But the materials have proven adaptable to various forming techniques and withstood a harsh winter. "This project was a bit of a triumph.”

Doris Wagner, the DiMaura Professor of Biology and a DumoLab partner for a collaboration with the Envirionmental Innovations Initiative and PennPraxis, agrees. “The structures created from natural materials are beautiful, nonpermanent, and link to their location,”she says.“They generated materials such as panels and shingles from plant waste that are functional, of aesthetic value, and close the cycle from regenerative agriculture to regenerative building practices.”

Three people hold wood-framed organic, perforated tiles in greenhouse — Agri Cell is an air-chamber cladding system (by Xiaoyue Cui, Qinming Hou, Hong Wei, Thomas Wyburn) made from sorghum, okra, and eggplant stem fiber, cellulose pulp, and pollen powder via 3d-printing and skinning.

Consider Agri Cell, an insulated cladding system of 3D extruded biomass blocks and cast pollen membranes developed by Weitzman students Xiaoyue Cui, Qinming Hou, Hong Wei, and Thomas Wyburn. Cui, Hou, and Wei are pursuing an Master of Science in Design with a concentration in environmental building design (MSD-EBD), a program dedicated to improving building performance that introduces students to simulation, integrated building design, building envelopes and systems, lighting, daylighting.

“The construction sector is one of the biggest culprits for solid waste and CO2 emissions, and at the same time a huge proportion of agricultural production is discarded as waste,” says Wyburn, a student in the Robotics and Autonomous Systems (MSD-RAS) program. “This is a great opportunity for the manufacturing and construction sectors to replace synthetic, petroleum based and unsustainable products with bio-based alternatives that are sustainable, biodegradable, and recycle waste material.

Cui explains, “Instead of treating biomaterials as passive elements, we explored how they can actively perform and contribute to architectural systems.”

Wei is interested in the performance potential of biomaterials—especially their water absorption capacity and thermal characteristics. For Agri Cell, her primary contribution was material experimentation and prototyping. “I led the film-making process, testing different percentage combinations of biomaterials to create films with varied properties,” she says. “I was also involved in 3D-printing trials using biomaterial mixtures and conducted testing on different plant-based material combinations within the farm system.”

Hou adds, “Visiting [Penn Farm] and learning how to identify different crops was both surprising and inspiring, as it created a tangible connection between material origin and architectural application.”

Hand touching golden shingles under sunlight — Harvest Cast (by Mu Cao, Elizabeth Aldridge, Ricardo Alvarado, Ziming He) is a lightweight shingle system made from sorghum, green bean, and okra stem fiber from Penn Farm, fruit peel collected from Penn Dining halls and Campus Food Trucks, and eggshell powder from regional poultry farm waste.

Another structure to emerge from the collaboration with the Farm is Harvest Cast, a lightweight shingle system made from sorghum, green bean, okra stem fiber, mango peel, and eggshell powder. It was designed by Mu Cao and teammates Elizabeth Aldridge, Ricardo Alvarado, and Ziming He—all students in the Master of Architecture program. “We combined ecological thinking, design research, and community engagement into one shared platform,” Cao says. “The most exciting part was seeing how different disciplines approached the same material system.”

Since December, two wooden structures at Penn Farm have held three panels each for testing purposes. Once the design and construction plans for the outdoor classroom have been finalized, the Harvest Cast shingles and other products of the Inquiry into Biomaterial Architectures seminar will be fabricated and installed.

In the meantime, DumoLab and students from the seminar will participate in the Biodesign Challenge competition at Parsons School of Design and at the Museum of Modern Art to be held in New York this June. And several prototypes produced by Mogas-Soldevila and her team will be on display at Meyerson Hall from March 17-20 as part of Research at Weitzman 2026, an exhibition surveying faculty research.

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At Penn Farm, Modeling the Future of Sustainable Architecture

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