Spotted: Architects Bastian Beyer and Daniel Suarez have turned soft knitted fibres into hard materials. These could potentially be used in construction to make spatial dividers, columns, roofs and walls. Here’s how it works: a soft textile structure is sprayed with an active bacteria culture, which reacts to a secondary treatment, creating a hard, useable building column.

The work by Beyer, a researcher at London’s Royal College of Art, and Suarez, is part of a larger project — ArcInTex — a training network of architects, designers, and textile makers working to create sustainable solutions for daily life.