The packet in your pantry that makes bread rise has just been printed into a wall.
At Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, a team of architects and chemists has built a bio-based material around heat-deactivated baker’s yeast. The yeast isn’t fermenting anything here. It is the biomass, the actual body of the material.
The recipe
Yeast, killed with heat, gets blended with cellulose fibres for tensile strength, algae-derived alginate to hold its dimensions, plant-based glycerol to keep it supple, and water. The result is a hydrogel smooth enough to push through a nozzle. A robotic arm prints it at room temperature using nothing but air pressure. No heating, no support scaffolding, no waste. It dries into its final shape on its own.
Nothing is pigmented. The colors, running from pale cream through amber to a deep, almost leathery brown, are the yeast’s own. Dial the glycerol up or down and the dried panel shifts from rigid to unexpectedly flexible.
Change the print path and you change the density, the porosity, and how much daylight makes it through.
That is where the team sees it living first. Room dividers, screens, partitions, panels that filter light and soften a room’s thermal swing. Not structure. Atmosphere.
Built to fall apart
The genuinely radical part is that this material is designed to disappear.
This challenges traditional notions that materials must last forever. Instead, we can think in terms of shorter life cycles and view material ageing as part of design.
Professor Malgorzata Zboinska, who led the study with doctoral researcher Yagmur Bektas
Construction has spent a century equating permanence with quality. Concrete, steel, glass, all of it built to outlive us, and all of it sitting in landfill long after the buildings come down. Chalmers is making the opposite case, that a finite lifespan is not a compromise but a design decision, and that a surface which darkens, ages, and eventually returns to the ground might be the point rather than the problem.
From the Moss & Fog Shop
It is an idea that has been quietly spreading for years, from handbags grown from mycelium to a sneaker engineered to compost. What is new is the scale of the ambition. This is not an accessory. It is architecture.
Plenty is still unsolved. Fire performance, moisture resistance at scale, whether any of this can be printed large enough to matter. The team is chasing stranger possibilities too, panels that heal themselves and surfaces that clean the air around them.
For now it is a set of amber-toned, light-catching objects grown from something you can buy at the grocery store, and left with permission to decay. The research was published in Frontiers of Architectural Research.
Research by Yagmur Bektas, Malgorzata Zboinska, Cecilia Geijer, Tiina Nypelö and Zeinab Hefny (Aalto University). Photography by Henrik Sandsjö, Chalmers University of Technology. Via urdesignmag.
