The Architect Who Grows Her Buildings

The studio smells of wet earth. On long steel tables, panels the colour of oatmeal sit under plastic tents, slowly knitting themselves together. Ines Valdés-Okafor lifts one and knocks on it like a door. It sounds like wood. Three weeks ago it was sawdust, rice husk and a teaspoon of fungal spores.

For six years Ines drew glass towers for a large firm in Porto. She was good at it, and she was bored. A residency at a materials lab gave her access to a microscope and, she says, a second vocabulary. She has not drawn a curtain wall since.

Half drafting room, half wet lab

Her twelve-person practice is split down the middle. Architects sit on one side, biologists on the other, and the coffee machine is deliberately placed between them. Every project begins with a material test rather than a sketch, and every drawing is revised when the material answers back.

Critics called her first pavilion a stunt. It is still standing, four winters later, and the cracks that appeared in its first year have closed on their own. Restoration teams across southern Europe now use her lime mortar recipe, which she published openly.

She is careful not to overclaim. Mycelium will not replace steel, she says, but it might replace a great deal of what we glue to it. The ambition is quieter and harder: buildings that age the way living things do, and that can be returned to the soil when they are done.