At a time when architecture is increasingly being judged on its environmental impact, our thinking about beauty is also shifting. Beauty is becoming detached from mere form and is increasingly rooted in the ethics and provenance of materials, as evidenced by the growing appreciation for natural and recycled materials. These developments constitute ethic-aesthetic practices that link creative expression with an awareness of its moral implications.
Material choices in architecture are never just technical; they are cultural, political and ecological. The impressive concrete volumes of 1960s brutalist architecture still enjoy wide appeal due to their well-known generosity in terms of democratic participation1 and their innovative building techniques. But to build fully in concrete today would feel rather misguided, given the unquestionably negative effects of concrete production on the environment and the lack of possibilities of an afterlife for concrete, as it isn’t easy to recycle or reuse. The exquisitely textured and generously laid natural-stone façade claddings and floorings from the 1990s share the same fate; they are no longer sustainable either economically or ecologically. But our perception of beauty towards these materials has also evolved over the decades through a critical examination of the material flows in the building industry. It is commonly acknowledged now that ‘the construction of a landscape in one place is related to the transformation elsewhere’.2 What used to be the norm for beauty has become a symbol of ignorance with regard to climate breakdown. 1 Shannon Mattern, ‘Surveillance Space: Urban Infrastructures of Control’, The Architectural Review (July/August 2024). 2 Jane Hutton, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements (Routledge, 2020), 3.
Ecological awareness may lead to a non-extractivist and even regenerative approach, but it won’t necessarily produce sober or ascetic architecture; rather, it will accelerate the search for new materials that are more environmentally friendly while accentuating reuse. In some cases, these two approaches overlap. It is more an educational gesture or awareness campaign than a design principle of austerity. Like the urban gardens of the early 2000s – acknowledged as insufficient to feed cities but invaluable in teaching citizens about food chains and local sourcing – today’s eco-materials and reuse practices are less about the immediate transformation of the entire construction industry and more about shifting what we consider beautiful. They reframe the aesthetics – in Rancerian terms, they redistribute the sensible. They act as a plea for a new understanding of value, where beauty lies in the intention, process and ethics behind the materials rather than only their surface appearance.
Material innovation: Between promise and proof
As the emergency of climate breakdown becomes more apparent and the will to fundamentally change the relationship between our economy and nature is lacking, the architecture field, like many others, has turned its gaze towards technological innovation as a solution. The 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale showcased visions of metabolic systems, bio-based materials and plant intelligence. Thrilling though these ideas may be, they often lack evidence or practical application, as yet at least. Architects, positioning themselves as material designers, make bold promises, sometimes with little to no proof of introducing ecological solutions with material innovation. Beauty here is, again, not in the glossy or organic textures of the materials themselves, but in the ambition to reimagine architecture’s relationship with nature.
The pioneering effect of introducing these ideas through speculation feels like an initiation, a way to warm the public to new possibilities. As with many trends, however, advocating for these projects without a critical stance risks reducing them to purely visual exercises, ultimately feeding into the spectacle with little to no impact.
‘There’s no such thing as a technology [apart from the standing reserve].’3 As Zoë Sofia has argued, technology isn’t developed only by some form of (human) intelligence, it requires available resources. Especially since modernism, nature has been exploited as the available resource, the standing reserve waiting to be transformed into building materials. Nowadays, this standing reserve is being expanded towards other forms of organic life, such as invasive plant species, bacteria, fungi and algae. These are locally sourced, and their production might as well serve in restoring the ecosystems they are rooted in. 3 Zoë Sofia, ‘Container Technologies’, Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000): 195.
The Weaving Weeds Pavilion for the Horst Arts and Music Festival in the Asiat Park was made with Japanese knotweed, an invasive species for the European landscape. The project was designed by Atelier Fanelsa, in collaboration with the Bioregional Design Lab of the Technical University of Munich. The process starts with the production of bio-sheets made of Japanese knotweed, AgarAgar, jute fabric, jute cord, tar and moss. Covering one of the festival stages, it aims to become a surface for the moss to grow on, a surface which, in time, might dissolve into the landscape of the park, leaving a very small carbon footprint behind while allowing for the growth of moss and eliminating at least some of the knotweed from the ecosystem. Its visual expression is quirky and mud-like, with a festive formation of ribbons weaving the structure.
New-old materials: Reused, recycled or repurposed
Rather than (re)invent new materials, another approach involves reusing discarded ones. This method avoids adding to the carbon footprint through the extraction of new materials. Dismantling one building can yield a material library of used but still high-quality elements. These pieces might end up in one or many new buildings, where they start their second lives. Reusing building elements such as sanitary products, bricks and tiles, recycling materials such as concrete and debris, and repurposing them in various creative ways is becoming more and more common. Theorized as urban mining, this approach relies heavily on a loose network of architects, developers and material depots organized to salvage and reuse materials in their projects. The beauty of this practice lies in its circularity, resourcefulness and ability to tell the story of a material’s past life reflected in its patina due to the time it has endured.
In conventional practice – since the last century, at least – architects design a building and specify materials for its parts, the building then being constructed accordingly. Today, as seen in Niteshop in Asiat Park, architects can also begin their design process by examining the materials at hand. Located on a former military zone, the park is an ongoing project, hosting the annual Horst Arts and Music Festival. When asked to restore the former infirmary unit, the design office Alter first explored the as-found materials. They reused steel plates recovered on-site as well as sanitary and furniture pieces salvaged from an administrative building in Brussels, after cleaning them and preparing them for assembly. They let the materials found during the design process define the outcome – such as seats that now function as insulation panels in the DJ booth. The aesthetics of Niteshop is determined by the designers’ material explorations, allowing coincidental encounters to produce unexpected outcomes.
The wider site of Asiat Park and the Horst Festival operate under a similar logic. To combat the consumerist approach of ephemeral events, the organizing team asks designers and artists to consider a structure’s afterlife from the moment they are appointed.4 As explained above with the Weaving Weeds Pavilion, this ensures that the carbon footprint of productions is limited to a minimum. Besides dissolving into the landscape, materials can be reused, recycled or repurposed after a stage’s lifespan. Designed by TedA arquitectos in 2026, the wooden structure of hoRAbaixa is now celebrating its third life. The wood was first used by Fala Atelier for the Feather stage in 2019, later repurposed by Leopold Banchini Architects in 2020 as the Moon Ra stage, and is now in its current iteration. The principles of easy (dis)assembly are coupled with collective construction by volunteers, who gain knowledge in working with basic materials and tools. Reuse itself here becomes a social project again, transcending aesthetics to enter the field of ethics. The adapted aesthetics of DIY constructions transform into a playfield of experimentation with materials. The design is now a game of bricolage of the as-found, not predefined, allowing for spontaneity and unexpected entanglements between materials of varying ages. This game sometimes produces mannerist results, surprising uses for unexpected materials, and an abundance of ideas. 4 Thanks to Carole Depoorter (Horst architecture programme coordinator) for sharing their approach in commissioning and realizing architectural projects for the Horst Festival and the Asiat Park.
It is the search for an architecture that, at the minimum, does no harm to the planet, even if it doesn’t yet restore it. A new material culture is emerging, one in which beauty is defined not by appearance but by intention. Through the innovative cultivation of living organisms, an ethics of reuse and care for planetary resources, our aesthetic norms are gradually shifting. In a way, they are ethic-aesthetic practices that ‘pertain to ecologies of creative practice, bringing together modes of (aesthetic) expression with an awareness of the ethical implications of such expressions’.5 Ultimately, this new material aesthetics concerns what we choose to value. Its transformation from a trend to an industry-wide paradigm shift is yet to be seen and tested, depending not only on market forces, but also on the continued commitment of architectural practice and a persistent discourse that prioritizes experimentation. 5 Hélène Frichot, Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2019), 21.
