Ecobrutalismo

A 269 m² single-family house built as in-situ board-marked concrete on a 6.6 m Soviet-inspired grid, in which vegetation, water, and seasonal reversal function as structural and climatic partners rather than decoration. The building is designed to be colonized — moss on engineered bands, wisteria on loaded cable nets, rain on an audible water chain — within verified engineering tolerances and a contractual 50-year maintenance doctrine.

Scheme 1 — the Horizontal Kommunalka — selected over two alternatives on service economy, structural directness, and the absence of transfer structures. Ground floor: a continuous public band — entry → kitchen-factory → dining → 6.2 m double-height living hall → two-story winter-garden prow that terminates the 33 m axis on a fig tree. Upper floor: four equal 6.6 × 3.5 m cells with private planted loggias, plus a top-lit, thermally independent workspace.

Six outdoor rooms, gradient-ordered from the raingarden swale to the roof meadow. No room opens onto none.

Load path: saturated roof meadow (5.0 kN/m² design) → 320 mm flat slabs on 6.15 m spans → six 400–450 mm cross walls acting as shear walls in both directions → 600–800 mm waffle mat. Trough edge beams carry 12–14 kN/m of saturated line load, triple-barrier waterproofed, flood-tested before planting. A 5.0 kN/m² services reserve in every slab protects the 30-year renovation scenario. There are no transfer structures anywhere.

Water balance: ≈ 283 m³/yr yield against ≈ 105 m³/yr demand — the surplus is routed visibly and exercises the swale by design. Concrete in four EN 206 mix families (GGBS 50–80%); formwork strikes only on maturity-method verification.

Aging is specified, not feared. Carbonation advances 2–5 mm/yr against 45–50 mm of cover. Arrises soften ~1 mm in twenty years. Moss on north bands reaches 60–80% cover by year 10–15 — at which point commissioning is complete. A vascular plant rooted in a frame wall is a defect; lichen on south faces is welcome after year ten.

Maintenance is two registers under contract: the wild — pruned, fed, never sanitized — and the controlled — zero tolerance, where repeated intrusion triggers a detail fix, not more weeding. Sensory qualities are contractual: petrichor off the plinth, the rain chain as the house's instrument, one touchable moss band, no decorative exterior lighting.

Verified tooling: Ladybug/Honeybee → EnergyPlus, EPA SWMM, WUFI hygrothermics, Karamba3D, L-Py growth simulation, EC3/ICE carbon data. Bio-receptive concrete at the current state of the art is empirical — TU Delft formulation work and panel testing; no predictive colonization tool exists, so biology is verified physically.

The canon that governs: the Barbican (designed patina), ACROS Fukuoka (terrace as structure), Narkomfin (frame, infill, and its documented wall-garden), Igualada (mass as geology), Ricola Kräuterzentrum (mass-wall humidity buffering), La Mémé (fifty years of frame, infill, and vine). The defining negative case: Robin Hood Gardens — vegetation fails where construction, budget, and maintenance never made it structural.