Engineered Living Materials, or ELMs, integrate living cells within engineered scaffolds to create adaptive and responsive functions. Living artefacts extend this approach by incorporating living organisms as active participants in designed objects, where biological activity contributes to ongoing responsiveness, interaction, and new forms of human–living system relationships. Both approaches have expanded the role of biology in design, positioning living systems as functional and tuneable components. However, current applications remain largely confined to discrete objects or material components, meaning microbial life in design is often spatially bounded and considered at short temporal scales. This limits the ability to engage with microbial systems as distributed ecological networks across built environments.

The archibiome concept addresses this gap by defining the subset of the built-environment microbiome that is intentionally shaped through architectural and material interventions. It includes both engineered microorganisms introduced through ELMs and native microbial communities whose recruitment, selection, and interactions are modulated through design strategies. Conceptually, the archibiome treats the built environment as a multiscale, feedback-controlled system integrating microbial community dynamics, engineered materials, and environmental conditions. Microbial processes are coupled to architectural parameters such as material composition, spatial configuration, moisture, light, and temperature through feedback loops in which system outputs influence future system states. This enables the prediction and regulation of system-level functions such as carbon sequestration, pollutant degradation, oxygen production, and self-regeneration.

Existing terms like building microbiomes, indoor microbiomes, and urban microbiome are primarily descriptive, characterizing microbial assemblages as emergent outcomes of environmental and design conditions without distinguishing whether or how these communities are intentionally shaped. The archibiome differs by framing microbial communities as integral, designable ecosystems distributed within architectural and infrastructural systems. Rather than focusing on isolated artefacts, the framework addresses how microbial processes are distributed and coordinated across spatial, temporal, and infrastructural scales, including their interactions with environmental conditions and human occupants. ELMs act as enabling technologies through which microbial functions can be engineered, monitored, and controlled, while living artefacts represent localized implementations within a broader ecological system.

Depending on their design, ELMs can perform biocatalytic functions such as bioremediation and carbon sequestration, bioreceptive functions such as protection and self-healing, and responsive functions such as sensing and signalling. The intrinsic capacity of ELMs for self-regeneration and self-healing can substantially reduce maintenance requirements and material replacement over time, aligning with circular bioeconomy principles by lowering resource consumption and enhancing the environmental sustainability of building systems. The archibiome is not only defined by intentional design but by the explicit integration of microbial dynamics with architectural control parameters, focusing on how microbial communities are regulated through spatially distributed gradients and feedback mechanisms including nutrient fluctuations, moisture regimes, material properties, and environmental exposure.

The importance of this framework is profound, particularly as modern humans spend up to 90 percent of their lives indoors. This prolonged exposure means indoor microbial communities, being an integral part of the exposome, play a critical role in shaping human health and wellbeing. Indoor air quality, exposed surfaces, and building materials shape the microbial landscape we interact with daily. While increasing evidence suggests associations between indoor microbial communities and human health, these relationships remain largely correlational, and further work is required to establish causal mechanisms and evidence-based design strategies. Designing indoor spaces with microbial ecosystems in mind therefore represents a promising but still emerging approach with direct implications for sustainability, as microbial communities contribute to carbon and nutrient cycling, pollutant degradation, and environmental buffering.

Adopting an archibiome perspective also raises challenges beyond design and material integration. Engineering microbial ecosystems at the scale of buildings requires careful attention to long-term dynamics, system stability, and unintended ecological consequences. It intersects with regulatory frameworks that are still evolving, particularly for products that intentionally introduce living microorganisms into built environments. Each ELM product is inherently unique, containing different organisms and having different functions and intended uses, meaning one-size-fits-all regulatory pathways are insufficient. Regulatory uncertainty can slow the translation of research into practice, as extensive testing is required to demonstrate safety, efficacy, and ecological compatibility. In both the European Union and the United States, agencies enforce strict biosafety regulations that consider the potential spread of microorganisms beyond the targeted environment. If genetically modified microorganisms are involved, additional requirements address their origin, genetic modifications, and potential for horizontal gene transfer.

Public perception is another critical factor. Concerns include uncontrolled microbial growth, allergenic responses, and survival of pathogenic organisms in sensitive environments such as hospitals or schools. These issues highlight the need for transparent communication and robust safety classification systems such as Qualified Presumption of Safety, Risk Group classifications, and FDA GRAS frameworks. Ensuring long-term stability and safety of ELMs requires both physical and biological containment strategies. Hydrogels, thermogels, and synthetic or natural polymers can physically constrain microbial growth, while genetic and metabolic engineering of microorganisms limits their survival, proliferation, or gene exchange outside intended conditions through approaches such as auxotrophy, kill-switches, or dependency on specific substrates. These approaches demonstrate the feasibility of creating living materials that are controllable, safe, and predictable.

From a systems biology perspective, the archibiome can be formalized as a coupled multiscale dynamical system linking intracellular regulatory networks, interspecies interactions, and environmentally mediated boundary conditions. At the microscale, stochastic or constraint-based metabolic models can describe microbial responses to environmental stimuli including nutrient availability, stress, and signalling dynamics. At the mesoscale, large hierarchical and consumer–resource models can capture competitive and cooperative dynamics governing community assembly and functional stability. At the macroscale, Building Information Modelling or computational fluid dynamics can represent processes and environmental heterogeneity in the built environment. These modelling layers can be integrated into a unified hybrid framework in which microbial dynamics are coupled to time-varying environmental fields defined by architectural parameters such as airflow, humidity gradients, surface chemistry, and material porosity, enabling the formulation of the built environment as a feedback-controlled ecological system.

Emerging research projects illustrate how the archibiome concept can be operationalized in practice. The ARCHI-SKIN project develops living coating systems based on the biofilm-forming fungus Aureobasidium pullulans, designed to protect building materials through self-regenerating and metabolically active layers. In this context, microbial performance is not only determined by species selection but by the interaction between substrate properties, nutrient availability, and environmental conditions. Complementary to this approach, the REMEDY project explores the integration of designed microbial consortia as living inks for architectural surfaces, combining functions such as carbon sequestration, pollutant remediation, and microbial balance with spatial patterning and digital fabrication strategies. For living active inks developed for architectural surfaces targeting carbon sequestration up to 15 kg CO2 per 10 square meters per year, oxygen production via photosynthesis up to 10 kg O2 per 10 square meters per year, self-regeneration with healing distance up to 2 millimeters, and bioremediation up to 140 kg VOCs per cubic meter of air per year, it can be hypothesized that spatial variation in environmental exposure such as light intensity, moisture availability, temperature, and airflow regimes will differentially modulate microbial metabolic activity and community composition across building surfaces. This hypothesis can be operationalized by predictive models of microbial growth and metabolite exchange with computational fluid dynamics simulations of airflow, light distribution, and humidity gradients, enabling prediction of spatially resolved performance metrics. Empirical validation can then be achieved through meta-omics data combined with in situ measurements of CO2 uptake, O2 production, and VOC degradation under both controlled and natural weathering conditions. Such an approach directly links design variables like façade orientation, material porosity, and environmental buffering capacity with quantifiable ecological and functional outcomes, supporting iterative refinement of both models and archibiome-informed design strategies. Ultimately, the archibiome does not diverge from the ELM field but extends its conceptual and operational boundaries, highlighting how advances in ELMs, synthetic biology, and systems biology can converge to support the development of adaptive, multifunctional built environments and marking a shift from descriptive to predictive and engineering-driven approaches to living systems in architecture.

Subject of Research: Microbial Ecology and Architecture

Article Title: The archibiome: extending engineered living materials to multiscale built environments

Article References: Sandak, A., Pajerski, W., Gubenšek, A., Butina Ogorelec, K., & Černoša, A. (2026). The archibiome: extending engineered living materials to multiscale built environments. Frontiers in Systems Biology, 6, Article 1943876. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsysb.2026.1943876

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fsysb.2026.1943876

Keywords: archibiome, engineered living materials, built environment, microbiome, probiotic design, regenerative architecture, synthetic biology, systems biology, extending, engineered, living, materials