When Architects Let Weather Build the Building

A brick arch on South Korea's Jeju Island was designed to disappear. Architecture studio stpmj built Dissolving Arch in 2017 from translucent rose-colored rock-salt bricks joined with cement mortar, knowing the island's rainy season would slowly eat the masonry away. Over several months, the solid vault thinned into an open mortar lattice — the weather, in effect, redesigning the building after the architects left.

Dissolving Arch is one of seven projects that flip architecture's usual job description. Buildings normally work to keep water out and slow decay. These experiments invite natural forces in as collaborators. Here's how each one does it.

How does rain design a wall?

Installed at the Osulloc Tea Museum on Jeju Island, Dissolving Arch initially enclosed a narrow passageway, its pink salt bricks filtering daylight. stpmj deliberately paired materials with opposite reactions to water: the salt dissolved under rainfall and humidity, while the mortar held. The arch grew more porous over the exhibition period, admitting light and views, with rain completing a process the architects set in motion.

Can a building be designed to decay?

Neri Oxman's Aguahoja I, developed with the Mediated Matter Group at MIT between 2014 and 2020, rises five meters in amber, glasslike surfaces of varying thickness. It was robotically fabricated from biopolymers derived from organic sources, including cellulose and chitosan. Exposed to water, those biopolymers break down and return to the environment. When the pavilion was installed on an outdoor terrace at SFMOMA, researchers instrumented it to monitor decomposition — the structure's disappearance was part of the design from day one.

What happens when winter builds the walls?

Curtain, by Alejandro Felix and Fang Cui, sat on Winnipeg's frozen Assiniboine River in 2023. The designers started with a simple timber frame wrapped in ropes, then pumped water from beneath the river ice through a dripping system. Icicles formed on the strands and thickened into irregular ice walls, enclosing the shelter. When temperatures rose, the process reversed: the ice thinned, turned translucent, and the timber frame re-emerged. The pavilion's enclosure grew and shrank with the thermometer all winter.

Can a building follow the tide?

FloatLab, a 75-foot-wide bright-yellow steel ring by J. Meejin Yoon and Höweler + Yoon Architecture, now floats on the tidal Schuylkill River near Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia. A buoyancy and ballast system lets it rise and fall with the river's daily tidal swing of roughly five to seven feet. Its sloping circular walkway carries visitors toward the water's surface. The structure has arrived on site, with public access planned for spring 2027.

How much of a building can the wind draw?

Ghost House, a 2021 installation by studio i/thee in California's Morongo Valley, began as two lightweight timber house-shaped frames. Custom-cut canvas sheets soaked in water-based adhesive were draped over them and left to the mountain winds. Over several hours the fabric billowed and twisted before hardening, fixing windblown geometry in place. Square openings cut afterward suggest windows. The architects built the frame; the gusts drew the rest.

What shape does a puddle make?

For Puddle Pavilion (2025), beside Mud Creek in Bondurant, Iowa, i/thee poured algae-based bio-resin directly onto flat ground — no molds. Gravity and surface tension spread the liquid into irregular pools. Once hardened, the sheets were lifted onto slender steel columns, turning puddles into bright-yellow elevated canopies whose undulating edges record exactly how the liquid behaved before it set.

Who else can build architecture?

Some 17,532 silkworms co-built Silk Pavilion II, a six-meter-tall structure by Neri Oxman and the Mediated Matter Group, presented at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The insects were placed on a textile stretched over a steel framework; a rotating apparatus guided them across the surface while light and temperature steered their movement and the density of the silk they spun. Their biological processes even opened gaps in the underlying fabric.

Across the seven projects, the pattern is the same: architects set the conditions, and something else — rain, ice, tides, wind, liquid physics or another species — finishes the form. As environmental performance becomes architecture's central problem, these experiments suggest that ceding some control to natural forces isn't a failure of design but a method of it.