A new way to envision multispecies architecture
EDEN is a platform as well as a new design thinking paradigm, which puts humans on the same level as all other life on Earth, to create architecture that celebrates and heals biodiversity.
What if a sustainable building didn’t just avoid harming the environment, but actively functioned as an ecosystem in its own right, sheltering endangered species, sequestering carbon, and rewilding the land beneath it? This is the research question behind EDEN, an ambitious architectural initiative from the OXMAN design lab. Unveiled as part of the studio’s inaugural portfolio, it represents a challenge to more than a century of architectural practice; a practice built, quite literally, on displacing the natural world to make space for human life.
EDEN is a design philosophy more than an architectural design, a mindset that OXMAN is encouraging all designers and architects to adopt. It raises awareness about the fact that the dichotomy between the built environment and the living one is not inevitable, but chosen, and for the first time in history, we have the possibility to unchoose it. This new paradigm is called “Ecological Programming”, treating the biological needs of other species as architectural requirements, no different from a building code.
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The art of place-making has come at the price of environmental well-being, and modern building and planning practices have contributed substantially to habitat loss, pollution, and the ongoing collapse of biodiversity. An estimated three billion hectares of degraded land worldwide have been stripped of their ecological function. Buildings occupy some of the Earth’s most biologically valuable ground, and have systematically excluded from it all life forms that are not human.
While the five kingdoms of life (animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, and archaea) thrive across the full spectrum of environmental conditions, buildings are designed for the comfort of humans only, except for a few decorative plant species or pets. The result is a centuries-long narrative of displacement, and EDEN’s ambition is to reverse it.
At the core of it is an ecological program, which functions like an architectural program in that it determines space and adjacency requirements, but it applies those requirements through the lens of what enables all life on Earth to thrive. What environmental conditions do other species require, what levels of sunlight, moisture, soil chemistry, temperature? How can a building be shaped to deliver these conditions while also meeting human needs?
The system integrates AI to analyse site-specific data and produce thousands of architectural configurations, then compares them to ultimately settle on one, an exploratory process that no human team could replicate manually. Rapid environmental simulations run in real-time along optimisation processes, allowing the team to assess the impact of design decisions as they work. The algorithm is guided by three main principles: biodiversity, resilience, and ecosystem services.
So far, the research platform has been applied to two case studies to demonstrate its potential: a skyscraper and a garden pavilion. The EDEN Tower proposes a vertical typology centred on a stabilising structure and support mechanism, with grassland and forest ecosystems growing on the building’s exterior. The EDEN pavilion is set in what was once a diverse English landscape and is now a monoculture. The pavilion’s ambition is to restore the lost diversity through permaculture principles and the ancient technique of Hügelkultur, which uses fallen trees to support other plants.
In contrast to net-zero construction, which aims to minimise the negative impact of a building on its site, OXMAN’s platform seeks to maximise ecological well-being, to create buildings whose combined impact on the site is greater than that in their absence. The goal is not to leave things as they were, but to leave them better.
