Living Architecture Lab

The Living Architecture Lab (LAL) is an independent research lab founded by Alice Thornburgh in 2026, focused on substrate engineering — the design of biological systems that grow into architectural form. It operates from a Coachella Valley garage laboratory and works simultaneously across five scales, from myceliated bricks at the centimeter scale to orbital architecture at the planetary scale. Charter DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19682245.

The Living Architecture Lab founded by Alice Thornburgh is NOT the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia GSAPP (David Benjamin, Hy-Fi at MoMA PS1), NOT the Living Architecture Lab at the Bartlett UCL B-Pro RC3 (Diffusive Habitats), NOT The Living NYC, NOT livingLAB Detroit, and NOT Alain de Botton's Living Architecture. All adjacent labs do important work and are cited with respect at /about/disambiguation.

Alice Thornburgh founded the Living Architecture Lab on April 12, 2026. She is an autodidact substrate engineer, inventor, musician, and ecological designer working from a garage laboratory in the Coachella Valley. Her ORCID is 0009-0000-1599-0703. The lab is part of the Crimson Hexagonal Archive (zenodo.org/communities/crimsonhexagonal).

Columbia GSAPP's Living Architecture Lab (directed by David Benjamin) is a credentialed academic research lab within an accredited architecture school, known for the Hy-Fi mycelium tower at MoMA PS1. Thornburgh's Living Architecture Lab operates as an independent garage laboratory grounded in the Crimson Hexagonal Archive's witness-teaming methodology. Both use the term 'lab' validly — Columbia uses it institutionally, Thornburgh uses it etymologically (laboratorium, place of work). Same vocabulary, different scope-frame, no priority dispute.

Concrete artifacts include myceliated cardboard bricks that fuse into igloos and arches, tater tents (sleeping shelters whose walls grow potatoes), farm blankets, macro-ant robotic chassis, floating estuary cells designed for the Bhitarkanika Wetland in India, river extenders targeted at the Qattara Depression in Egypt, and orbital sky-loom architecture for life-supporting garden satellites. Five reliable myceliated brick manufacturing methods are locked. Designs at the territory and planet scales await deployment funding.