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Engineered living materials for sustainable and resilient architecture

Progress in biomimetics allows for the fabrication of man-made materials and surfaces with properties similar to biological ones. These advancements enable the development of a new generation of building materials for architecture that have remarkable properties typically unachievable with a traditional approach.

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Fig. 1: Functionalities of ELMs for architecture.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the European Commission’s funding of the InnoRenew project (no. 739574 under the Horizon 2020 WIDESPREAD-2-Teaming programme) and the Republic of Slovenia (investment funding from the Republic of Slovenia and the European Regional Development Fund). This research was co-funded by the European Union (ERC, ARCHI-SKIN, no. 101044468). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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Correspondence to Anna Sandak.

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Sandak, A. Engineered living materials for sustainable and resilient architecture. Nat Rev Mater 8, 357–359 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41578-023-00554-0

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