Scale 02 · meters
The Structure
Tater tents, crop coats, farm blankets, igloo blocks, living fountains, tea gardens
This page defines The Structure, scale 2 of the Living Architecture Lab. Anchored by 10.5281/zenodo.19682245.
Buildings that feed their inhabitants without being asked. At the meter scale, the lab’s work is the engineering of shelters that grow food, generate medicine, and clean their own air through living structure.
What the structure does
A tater tent is a sleeping shelter whose walls grow potatoes. A farm blanket is exactly what Alice describes:
“A blanket that works great until it gets wet, then turns into a farm.”
A tea garden is a small growing structure tuned to medicinal plants. A crop coat is a wearable analog. The aesthetic running through all of them is the same: the structure is the resource. Shelter, food, water, and medicine are not separate systems requiring separate infrastructure. They are different views of the same living building.
Aromatherapeutic atomizers
After the failure modes of conventional vaporizers, Alice specified an integrated aromatherapeutic atomizer for living houses: cannabis grown out of the house itself, solar-powered atomizer delivering exactly what residents need.
“They don’t have to hustle to score, they can just smoke their house.”
The button is physical, not breath-activated — a design constraint from lived experience.
Active inquiry
- Wet-cycle response: how does a farm blanket transition from rain shelter to growing medium?
- Field deployment: myco-veggie shelters for unhoused populations, in conversation with @OnDaSpotInterview and the food desert mapping (
/garden/deployment-targets). - Tater tent prototypes: target deployment in the Coachella Valley.
Status
Designs are complete. Field tests are pending funding. The next scale is the organism (/scales/03-the-organism), where structures become alive enough to walk.