Ileum Pavilion at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)

Designers: Mae-ling Lokko 

HKW team: Fernande Bodo / Sebastian Springer 

Architects: Frederik Fuchs (ephem) / Matthias Weis (ephem) 

Design Production Team: Mae-ling Lokko / Gustavo Crembil / Oswaldo Chinchilla / Alireza Zamani Samani 

Panel Manufacturing Partners: Ricehouse Benefit Corporation / Opovate Ltd. / OR Foundation Ghana 

Soil is home to the greatest number of species including not only the animal, plant, and fungi kingdoms of life but also for a broad range of materials. Seeping, eroding, diluting, mixing, filtering, storing, transporting, and sedimenting, the dynamic patterns of material migration in and out of soil horizons continuously reconstitute its territory as well as the broader ecology of human and non-human health over time. Over the past five centuries, unprecedented scales of mining, farming, and transforming materials have transformed soil ecosystems, compromising their capacity to nurture and sustain a broad range of biotic activity. Through its cataloguing of soil composite panels, the Ileum pavilion explores pluriversal roles of architecture in confronting its more recent historical indifference to soil ecosystems.

Ileum draws upon Berlin’s Großes Tropenhaus (a large tropical greenhouse, located in the Botanischer Garten in Dahlem), as a reference site for repair of both soil ecosystems and contemporary building cultures. Designed by Alfred Koerner in 1905 to house over 1,400 plant species from the African, Asian, and Australian tropics, the Großes Tropenhaus remains one of the largest steel and glass structures in the world. Alongside the importation of tropical flora into the greenhouse, the highly-networked botanical and colonial enterprise invented new systems of taxonomic classification that underpinned not only the centralization and control over global plant research but lucrative commercial applications in agriculture, pharmaceutical, and energy industries.

Replacing the Tropenhaus’s self-supporting iron and glass cold frame with a timber structure, the pavilion’s panelling system is reconstituted with composites of not only biogenic materials, but a growing scale of synthetic and secondary mineral industry by-products. By-products from twenty[1]first century enterprises including agriculture (rice husk, fly ash), metal manufacturing (ferro-silicon alloy by-products), and renewable energy systems (recycled solar panel glass fibres) are used as substrate, binder, and additive in earthen composite panels using non-toxic and low carbon material life cycle processing.

Embedded on the panel’s surface are shredded cotton particles, made from second hard clothing imported into West Africa. Across Ghana’s Atlantic coast and landfill sites, every week, 15 million second hand garments are shipped to Ghana from the United Kingdom, United States and China. Another 1.7 million tonnes of plastic including single-use black plastic bags used in every sector of Ghana’s economy are generated every year. Absorbed onto the surface of the geopolymer and mycelium panels, Ileum narrates the process of soil’s metabolism of textiles.