After Winka Dubbeldam’s introduction, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen discusses the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) research into challenging conventional material practice. Their work registers a shift from considering material behavior to resource thinking, i.e. “Not asking the brick what it wants to be, but asking where does the brick come from.”

Thomsen’s work focuses on building with bio-based materials within a context of considering the larger life-cycle of materials, i.e. metabolistic architecture.
One example is the Repair Pavilion (2025), constructed of blue biomass biopolymer composites, maintenance is designed into the structure’s life-cycle.

She describes other projects, involving reclaimed timber, biocement, palm leaf weaving, cyanobacteria and photomorphogenesis.

Thomsen concludes, “To embrace a metabolistic design practice is to reimagine architecture as a living system: open-ended, metabolically aware, and ecologically entangled. … The future of architectural sustainability lies not in perfecting end-of-life scenarios, but in eliminating the notion of an end altogether.”