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Design

Condos Made Out of Condiments?

A building project that uses salt deposits to grow an outer wall.

Forget building yourself a house from bricks and mortar, it’s way too laborious. All those bricks, all that mortar. Instead just grow it from salt. Faulders Studio, based in Berkeley, California have a project called GEOtube which is a “vertical salt deposit growth system” that’s being proposed for use in Dubai, where they’ll use water from the Persian Gulf to grow an exo-skeleton of salt which will form a latticework of pipes that will harden over time as the water evaporates, creating a solid wall for the buidling. Here’s what they say:

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“Born from unique environmental conditions, GEOtube is a new kind of urban sculptural tower. Gravity-sprayed with adjacent Persion Gulf waters, its building skin is entirely grown rather than constructed; is in continual formation rather than fully completed; and is created locally rather than imported. The world’s highest salinity for oceanic water is found in the Persian Gulf (and the Red Sea) — local salt water is supplied to GEOtube via a new 4.62 km buried pipeline and misted onto the tower’s exposed mesh. As the water evaporates and salt deposits aggregate over time, the tower’s appearance transforms from a transparent skin to a highly visible white solid plane. The result is a specialized habitat for wildlife that thrives in this environment, and an accessible surface for the harvesting of crystal salt.”

[via Weburbanist]