VAMO — Vegetal, Animal, Mineral, Other
A Circular Vision for Architecture at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 ETH Zurich, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and global collaborators including DumoLab Research (DLR) at Penn Weitzman present a lightweight, regenerative installation that explores alternatives to architectural permanence.
VAMO premiered at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition "Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.", curated by Carlo Ratti and organized by La Biennale di Venezia. The exhibition opens to the public from May 10 to November 23, 2025. Presented in the Corderie of the Arsenale, VAMO contributes to the Biennale’s call for architecture to shift from mitigation to adaptation and introduces a biodegradable, modular structure made from reclaimed materials. Anchored around a historic brick column, VAMO reimagines the future of architectural practice through circularity. Every component is biodegradable, and most are repurposed: the structure is made of upcycled wood, while cladding and surrounding elements repurpose spent coffee grounds, coconut husks, waste wool and garments, waste Murano glass, leather discards, pineapple peels, fishery and forestry waste in the case of DumoLab's Ramus-0 —all given a second life through unique processes.
DumoLab was commissioned with Ramus-0 comprising four large scale components for VAMO. The team tapped into ongoing research in our Ramus series that focus on regenerative material blends that can be additively manufactured and able to bind wood biomass particles from agricultural and forestry waste without the use of petrochemical-based binders. Arranged bundled and latticed patterns obtain in Ramus-0 stiff rim and axis conditions while preserving overall flexibility and lightness, with capacity to mediate light, ease of transportation and assembly, and ensures maximum material exposure for fast decay later into forest soils.
Fuel-free printable wood comes with a challenge of rationalizing biopolymers from abundant natural resources into binders with not only predictable but also robust mechanical properties similar to synthetic counterparts. To evolve our Ramus blends we are currently embarked into a multiyear journey of articulating nature’s assembly strategies. We use simple polysaccharides and fibers with medium strength capacity but arranged into tuned geometric conformations at the nanoscale to make emerge superior performance at the macro-scale. Ramus-0, and the entire upcoming Ramus series, couple benign wood biomass composites research and novel additive manufacturing techniques to enable precise material distribution, designed hierarchy, minimum material use, and zero waste. It contributes to invention of structural and tunable material systems able to break down without toxicity.
Location: Corderie of the Arsenale, Venice, IT
DumoLab's Team: Bowen Qin (PhD Arch), Behzad Modanloo (PhD Arch), Eda Begum Birol (PhD Arch), Alexia Luo (MArch Thesis), Nazhla Alizadegan (MSD-AAD) and Dr Laia Mogas-Soldevila
Support: This work is supported by the Johnson&Johnson Foundation Woman in STEM2D Award.
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