Unlikely Friends: Bacteria in Architecture Could Contribute to a Sustainable Future
Deserts are cast as an unforgiving landscape: a sea of endless sand dunes beneath a relentless sun, where a beleaguered traveler wanders for miles in desperate search of food, water, or shade. Relief comes in the form of the ultimate desert trope, a lush oasis. If the traveler is lucky and this oasis is no cruel mirage, they will soon find sanctuary beneath the sweeping fronds of the date palm trees and may even feast upon their sweet fruit. Yet this familiar trope has a basis in reality. For 7000 years, people have relied on date palms (Phoenix dactylifera) to provide sustenance and refuge from the harsh desert sun. Today more than ever, we need shelter from the sun— the earth is getting hotter and human driven climate change is causing extreme weather, record-shattering heatwaves, and droughts. In regions where the date palm is cultivated and grown, summer temperatures are rising, reaching average monthly highs of 110 degrees Fahrenheit. For the 2025 BioDesign Challenge, featuring international student projects at the intersection of biotechnology, art, and design, “harnessing biological capabilities to reimagine our world as one inextricably linked through living matter,” architect Dr. Sandra Piesik and her students at Pratt teamed up with the Dietrich Lab at Columbia University to look to the past for a sustainable future.
The date palm’s value extends far beyond its fruit. For millennia, Indigenous communities across the Middle East and North Africa have harvested nearly every part of this essential tree for building materials, weaving bundles of fronds into walls and roofs and using the sturdy trunks for structural timber. As recently as the 1950s, “Dubai would have around 4000 date palm leaf houses housing 12,000 people” says Piesik, who is exploring traditional knowledge of date palms to inspire her sustainable development practices.
While Dr. Piesik was a visiting professor at the Pratt Institute, the BioDesign Challenge encouraged her to put a twist on her date palm-centered architecture by incorporating a living factor. To promote adaptable solutions for a changing world, she turned to a surprising solution: bacteria.
While working with natural materials was not foreign to Piesik, living material was a new frontier, so she reached out to Dr. Lars Dietrich for his microbiology expertise. He was thrilled to explore this collaboration given his longstanding interest in “the interface of architecture, art, and science.” At the time, Dietrich and one of his PhD students, Devon King-Roberts, were teaching a microbiology lab course, along with TAs Griffin Gowdy and Riley McGarrigle, and one of the class assignments sent students out into the city to collect samples, isolate microbes, and uncover the microscopic world around them. The cross-university interdisciplinary team applied this approach to the BioDesign Challenge to identify a bacterium which could grow symbiotically with date palm leaves to form an enhanced sustainable building material that would provide more efficient heat reflection and cooling in desert climates.
The Pratt design students weren’t as “sedimented in the ways to think about science” says King-Roberts. [The students] brought us tree bark or moss or just different natural things, and they were like, how do I make this a sample? And we were like, yeah, how do you do that?” Through trial and error, King-Roberts, Dietrich, and the students isolated Kocuria rosea from the Pratt Institute campus as a bacterium which could be cultured on date palm leaves and has a distinctive reddish-pink color. Combining date palm leaves with this ubiquitous bacterium “might enhance their structural and thermal properties,” Dietrich says.
This is not the first time that living organisms have been proposed as building materials. Bricks made from fungal mycelia, underground root-like fungal structures, have gained traction in the architecture world. Mycelia bricks have one huge advantage over commonly used materials such as clay and sand. Standard bricks need to be heated up to harden, a process that releases tremendous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Mycelia bricks, on the other hand, are not heated, contributing to their sustainability.
Fungi aren’t the only miniature living builders from which architects can draw inspiration. Bacteria like the ones Dietrich studies generate sturdy structures called biofilms. Without realizing it, you have probably encountered many biofilms in your life: the slimy layer that builds up on your teeth, the slippery coating that accumulates on rocks in a stream. Bacteria self-generate these biofilms from a blend of sugars, DNA, and tough proteins to create a protective home for the colony. Even after bacterial populations die, the biofilm remains, suggesting that, like mycelia, it could serve as a long-lasting material.
Dr. Piesik and Dr. Dietrich’s students found that Kocuria rosea was able to act as a binding agent for date leaves and fungal mycelia, securing a built façade to successfully reflect heat from the harsh desert sun. Strikingly, Kocuria roseaadded beauty to the material. The sunset-pink pigment produced by the bacteria was admired by both design students and microbiologists alike.
The final design, which is meant to empower women and local communities, support bio-circular economies, and foster climate resilience, is a powerful exercise in imagination. To apply this design to real world architecture would require identifying the ideal biofilm-producing bacteria, which would be a challenge. Dr. Dietrich notes that researchers “study maybe a hundred bacterial species in labs worldwide”, but there are trillions of bacterial species. These bacteria may produce “endless variations of really cool materials … that we don't even know about.”
What came out of this teamwork was not only a project that gained international recognition in the 2025 BioDesign challenge, but a lesson in collaboration. In addition to the three students at Columbia, a total of eleven students from Pratt worked on Hybrid Habitats: Bhavya Manish Prajapati, Mithila Sunil Patil, Falguni Sakpal, Alara Ata, Andreas Palfinger, Aysin Bahar Sahin, Anand P. Popat, Kayla J. Reyes, Lucius Hu, Ren Henniger, Rundong Ying. Dr. Piesik says that “being open and advertising openness to collaboration” is a driving force in these creative projects. When Dietrich works with artists, he finds that their work converges on the same “quest”: finding the beauty and truth in nature. “I think it’s something universal that we are all drawn to,” he says.
As a department rooted in basic biology here at Columbia, we specialize in answering big questions. Applying our answers and novel knowledge can be more challenging. But collaborating with people in far flung fields, from architecture and sustainable development to economics, can help solve global problems. In this case, two unlikely friends, the date palm and a bacterium, have been brought together to propose a creative solution for human habitats in warming and desertifying places across our changing world.