Bio-mestizaje, explores a speculative future in rural Venezuela shaped by fractured geopolitics, material scarcity, and microbial potential. In this world, survival depends not on extraction, but on deep relationships with living materials. The project merges care, culture, and biology into an architecture of interdependence—where corn, beans, and coffee become both building blocks and kin.
Context: Materials are political—both at macro and micro scales
At a macro level, Venezuela’s geopolitical landscape has become a battleground for survival. Foreign sanctions and tariffs dictate resource access, tightening the grip of scarcity. At a micro scale, our bodies tell a parallel story: we are only 33% human cells, the rest is an intricate network of microbes that shape our health. Yet, in the wake of COVID-19, rising germaphobia has driven an obsession with sterility, stripping materials of both harmful and beneficial microbes—our own form of diplomatic failure. The following drawings deconstruct the Venezuelan crisis and set up the stage for this speculative project.
This project speculates on a distant future—where Venezuela's political and economic fractures have deepened.
Global supply chains have collapsed. Extreme sterility and political isolation make rural survival in Venezuela impossible without new, entangled ways of living.
Bio-mestizaje proposes an architecture of co-existence: an intergenerational space where childcare and eldercare are merged within living systems that include materials and microbes as equal participants. A central idea is mestizaje—the historical and cultural blending of African, Indigenous, and European lineages across Latin America. But here, mestizaje extends beyond human identity. It becomes bio-mestizaje: a fusion between humans and culturally significant materials like corn, beans, and coffee—staples of both food and biomaterial production.
The characters previously introduced: Champiñones (Mushroom People - healers), Frijolitos (Bean people - growers and composters), Cafecitos (Coffee people - teachers), and Mazorcas (Corn people - cooks) each engage in traditional Venezuelan practices inside the intergenerational space defined by four rooms, each constructed from the very materials they represent.
These materials are more than symbolic. They are metabolizers, hosts, and co-creators. They support living architecture that grows, heals, and digests waste. Through fungal relations, microbial exchange, and composting systems, the project speculates about waste loops that regenerate resources and enrich our collective microbiomes.
Bio-mestizaje is not just a speculative take on infrastructure—it's a reflection on material resistance, a response to geopolitical collapse, a reimagining of care, and a practice of co-designing with bio-based and living materials.
ingredients: Corn husk.
Ingredients: Extracted corn husk fiber.
Ingredients: Water, corn husk agar agar, glycerol, sawdust.
Ingredients: Spent Coffee, water, agar agar, glycerol.
Ingredients: Spent Coffee, corn husk, water, agar agar, glycerol.
Ultimately, Bio-mestizaje invites us to ask:
How can biomaterials assist communities to cultivate resilience amid unstable global politics and economies?
If we’re only 33% human cells, what would it mean to design in consideration of the entangled microbial health across beings, and materials?
How do we co-design with materials to facilitate environmental remediation?
In a future where survival depends on interdependence, Bio-mestizaje imagines architecture that is cooked, composted, and crafted in collaboration with the earth.
About the Author
Bio-mestizaje was developed by Jennifer Lara Rodriguez as part of her graduating project from the Bachelor of Design in Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism at UBC (Class of 2025). Born in Venezuela and of mestiza heritage—a term that describes people of mixed Indigenous, European, and African ancestry—Jennifer’s work is rooted in the intersection of identity, ecology, and materiality. Her interest in biomaterials in architecture began during a research abroad program at the Bioregional Architecture Lab at the Technical University of Munich, led by Niklas Fanelsa. She continued learning about these themes at UBC through the Biogenic Architecture Lab under Joe Dahmen. Her involvement with MCELLS has further deepened her curiosity about microbial agency in materials. Jennifer hopes to continue engaging in this topics in her future work.
UBC’s Point Grey Campus is located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) people. The land on which we work and learn has always been a place where Musqueam people for millennia have passed on their culture, history, and traditions from one generation to the next.