A House Made Out of Meat?

A not-so-mad architect-turned-scientist suggests that we could make houses from living tissue. Um, gross.

In a video of his talk at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference from February 2010, Dr. Mitchell Joachim jovially suggests that we could someday build houses out of meat. From anyone else, we'd think this was nothing more than a joke, but coming from the man who is co-founder of the first architectural office to put in a molecular cell biology lab, we wondered just how serious Joachim was. ShelterPop caught up with Joachim recently, and it turns out: He's very serious indeed.

If you asked Joachim: Why grow houses? He'd answer: Because we can. Joachim and his firm Terreform ONE are well-known for their unusual proposals for creating greener cities. One project, the Fab Tree Hab, proposed grafting trees together to create a home. Now Joachim says we should be thinking about growing homes from meat. "It's an extremely serious idea," said Joachim. However, he admits that your ShelterPop editors weren't wrong to interpret a hint of playfulness in his TED talk. "My delivery is a spoonful of sugar with the medicine," he says. He says that he and his firm Terreform ONE wanted to begin the research and the experiments in order to "ask the right questions" about combining molecular science with architecture.

Joachim reveals that the idea for the In Vitro Meat Habitat came while he was touring the country talking about the Fab Tree Hab. A wise guy heckler in one audience asked him why he didn't make a house out of meat, and it got Joachim thinking. Shortly after, PETA ran a competition to create a consumable item made from test tube meat. Joachim and his colleagues re-interpreted PETA's charge as consumable goods, rather than something you would actually eat. (As Joachim revealed during our conversation, meat grown in a test tube is far from tasty, and he doubts it will ever be used for food.) From these two events the idea for the In Vitro Meat Habitat was born.

While the idea of a house made up of living tissue is horrifying, no sentient creature is harmed in Joachim's design. "In vitro" means test tube-produced extra cellular matrix derived from pig cells. "At the end of the day, what you get is 100% beef jerky," says Joachim. "We don't intend to keep it alive." As Joachim explains it, the tissue that would make up the walls of the house has no immunological system, no skeletal system or anything else to keep it alive, and once it's exposed to air it would die. So what Joachim proposes is to preserve it and stretch it over a specialized scaffolding to create the structure.

While Joachim and Terreform ONE have created a football-sized model of the In Vitro Meat Habitat (above), a full-scale version is still far from becoming a reality. According to Joachim, while the house would be possible to create, it would cost an enormous amount of money (it currently costs $3,000 just to create a few centimeters of tissue). So don't hold your breath for a beef jerky clad house anytime soon.

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or see ShelterPop's past coverage of all things IKEA!