Hospitality Design - November 2017 - 126

changemakers

the experimentalist
Mitchell Joachim
Terreform ONE

The Statue of Liberty fits
snuggly in one hour's
worth of compacted waste
from New York alone for
the Rapid Re(f)use project

Under Canvas Zion sits on 196 acres
that border Utah's national park

Brooklyn-bred Mitchell Joachim hopes to
turn New York into "the greenest city on
the planet," he says. Much of his work at
sustainability-focused nonprofit architecture
research and consulting group Terreform
ONE, of which he is cofounder alongside
fellow Harvard University grad Maria
Aiolova, is pointed directly at that goal.
Joachim cut his teeth with innovators
including Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, and Moshe
Safdie and has degrees from such prestigious
universities as Harvard, MIT, and Columbia.
So, when opening his own firm, "I knew I
didn't want to have any kind of traditional
practice. I wanted it to be experimentalist,
and a nonprofit seemed to be a way where
we could survive," he says. The practice
started in 2006 in a building in Downtown
Brooklyn that ultimately confined Joachim's
aspirations. "We saw architecture as part
garage experiments, not just fancy people
behind computers," he says. "It requires a
different facility." Recently they found a true
home in a massive shared space with other
creatives near the Brooklyn Navy Yard that
was formerly a machine shop for battleships.
Terreform ONE's projects coincide with
the company motto: "Design with Life." Bio
City Map of 11 Billion, for instance, pushed
the company's ambitions further: The display
estimates where the largest concentrations
of the human population will be at the end
of the 21st century using E.coli colonies
grown into specific shapes. Joachim asked
his team, "Can we control bacteria and use
it as an analog form of computation?" The
only genetic modification to the E.coli, he
explains, was making them luminescent in

their onsite laboratories, "but other than that,
it's just plain old E.coli." For projects like this,
Joachim says he was merely inspired by "life
itself, and then from that we try and nudge
life to do things it [wouldn't] normally do."
That's true for their buildings as well.
With Fab Tree Hab he envisions homes
grown from trees, with the rest of the
material made entirely from living nutrients.
Rapid Re(f)use aims to turn New York
City's trash into treasure-or buildings-by
"thinking about logical ways we can upcycle
our waste and design things to not be thrown
away but to retrofit our existing elements in
cities," he explains, with metals for structures
or organic compounds for scaffolding, for
example. Using automated robot 3D printers
modified to process trash and then wrapping
it in "infinitely recyclable high-body energy
aluminum," Terreform ONE has the capacity
to create simple but strong bricks out of
recycled waste that could remake seven new
Manhattan islands at full scale.
Unconventional projects like these,
however, will always receive pushback,
particularly from climate change deniers.
"If we don't build the systems we need to be
resilient against climate dynamics, we're
absolute fools," he explains, adding he is
working on cricket farms to combat the
impending food crisis as cricket flour has
proven to be a viable protein alternative.
In the short term, more manageable
projects are underway. Working with Intel
on a building in Manhattan's Lower East
Side, Terreform ONE is creating a vertical
sanctuary for the diminishing monarch
butterfly population. A double-skinned
façade holding a vertical meadow with
silkweeds and caterpillars is made to be
self-sufficient for the butterflies, but they
won't be the only beneficiaries. The fragile
insects "are a really good wellness indicator,"
Joachim says. "If butterflies can survive, you
and I can survive."
Hospitality Design - November 2017

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