Project Overview

Nature has already invented the world’s most sophisticated plastics. Long before petrochemicals, organisms developed structural polymers—cellulose, lignin, chitin, collagen, and keratin—that combine mechanical performance, repairability, biodegradability, and carbon storage through millions of years of evolution. Rather than inventing new synthetic materials, this project asks what becomes possible when architecture begins with nature’s plastics first.

Project Journey

Upscaling Wool Ecologies is currently on exhibit at the 2026 Oslo Architecture Triennale

Project Team

Jonathan Grinham
Leonard Palmer
Jack Alvarenga
James Langford
Sophie Hutter

Wool

Wool has historically connected landscapes of grazing with regional systems of shearing, collection, grading, scouring, spinning, weaving, manufacturing, and trade. During the twentieth century, synthetic fibers increasingly displaced wool in many applications. At the same time, government reserve-price systems that had helped stabilize wool markets collapsed in major producing countries.¹ Global sheep-wool production nevertheless remains substantial. Approximately 1.95 billion kilograms of raw wool are produced annually by roughly 1.2 billion sheep.² Yet contemporary textile markets use only part of this resource. Approximately 60 percent is used in wool apparel manufacturing, while medium- and coarse-grade fibers face significantly weaker demand.³ Wool that cannot be sold may be stockpiled, burned, buried, or otherwise discarded.^{4, 5}

Describing this material simply as waste obscures the nature of the problem. The fiber remains a highly organized biological material composed primarily of keratin, a natural protein polymer. Keratin comprises approximately 90–95 percent of wool fiber and is stabilized by hydrogen bonds, ionic interactions, hydrophobic forces, and disulfide bridges.⁶ At the fiber scale, a protective cuticle surrounds the cortex, while the air-filled medulla of coarse fibers provides additional thermal resistance.⁷ Wool can absorb substantial quantities of moisture, self-extinguish rather than readily propagate flame, and provide useful acoustic absorption.⁸

The material has not lost its properties. It has lost its position within an economic and industrial system.

Upcycling Wool Ecologies treats waste not as an intrinsic material category but as evidence of a broken relationship among biological production, industrial infrastructure, and economic markets. The design problem becomes one of reconstructing those relationships: Developing new functions for fibers rejected by textile markets while reconnecting agricultural production, regional manufacturing, and architecture.

The wool used in this exhibition is preconsumer waste from the American Woolen Company in Stafford Springs, Connecticut. First established in 1842, it is one of the few remaining integrated woolen mills in the United States that can spin yarn, weave cloth, and finish fabric. The wool originates with U.S. sheep producers and has been scoured and processed for textile manufacturing. Its varied colors record both naturally colored and dyed fibers, preserving visible traces of the material’s previous industrial life.

Millpost, Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia. Image courtesy of The Woolmark Company

American Woolen Company, Stafford Springs,Connecticut, U.S.A. Image courtesy of Avantika Velho

New Chemistry

Rebuilding waste wool’s industrial ecology begins by reconfiguring the molecular structure of its keratin-rich fibers into a biocomposite in which wool serves as both reinforcement and binder. Chemical, mechanical, and thermal inputs partially disassemble and reorganize the fiber’s existing structure, producing a new material state from the same biological feedstock. These inputs do not simply preserve the fiber in another form; they establish a new configuration suited to architectural performance. Upcycling, therefore, means more than reuse. It is the controlled reorganization of an undervalued material into a higher-quality, longer-lived configuration using the chemical potential already present within its biological structure. We call this configurational stewardship.

The alkaline treatment disrupts the keratin structure, hydrolyzing peptide bonds and degrading disulfide cross-links to produce smaller keratin fragments. Mechanical homogenization further separates the material, exposing cortical cells and producing a keratin-rich aqueous dispersion.⁹ The addition of citric acid promotes a second transformation. Acting as a comparatively benign crosslinker, it forms covalent linkages among reactive groups in the keratin chains.¹⁰ When the wool-derived keratin and citric acid are heated together, they form a continuous polymeric matrix capable of binding residual and unprocessed wool fibers into a rigid composite without a petrochemical resin.

Keratin-rich gel

Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of wool at different stages of processing. Scoured, unprocessed wool fiber

Wool fiber after 24h alkaline treatment

Keratin-rich gel

Keratin biopolymer film

Wool Mills to Paper Mills

Laboratory material science operates in grams and centimeters. Architecture operates in kilograms, tonnes, square meters, and, ultimately, millions of buildings. Scaling requires more than enlarging a recipe. It requires coordinating the machinery, labor, logistics, energy systems, and regional industries needed to process heterogeneous biological materials reliably and economically.

Laboratory-scale development by the Grinham Research Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in collaboration with the Aizenberg Group at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences first characterized the structure–property relationships of the wool biocomposite.

The work presented at the Oslo Architecture Triennale translates this chemistry into a new industrial ecology by connecting wool processing with another mature but contracting fiber industry: pulp and paper. Working with the Pulp and Paper Pilot Plant at North Carolina State University, the team demonstrated that equipment and methods developed for one fiber system could be redirected toward another. Industrial pulping machinery provides the high-volume agitation and homogenization needed to combine alkaline treatment with mechanical fiber refinement. Equipment designed for screening, dewatering, pressing, and kiln-drying fibrous slurries offers additional pathways for scaling architectural material production. The team consequently transferred a process once measured in hundreds of grams to a pilot-scale demonstration at the scale of hundreds of kilograms.

The proposition is not simply to construct a larger, specialized machine for wool. It is to co-locate and reconnect existing industrial capabilities that have become economically and geographically disconnected. Sheep producers provide a renewable biological feedstock. Scouring and textile operations aggregate, clean, grade, and preprocess the wool. Pulp and paper facilities contribute high-volume fiber-processing machinery and expertise. Panel manufacturers contribute to forming, pressing, drying, and finishing technologies. Architecture becomes the meeting point where these disconnected systems are brought back into a productive relationship.

Pulp and Paper Pilot Plant, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A.

Hydrolyzed wool drained from pulper at Pulp and Paper Pilot Plant, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A

Fiber to Buildings

Building-envelope materials can perform several functions simultaneously. An exterior retrofit system operates as an environmental interface, mediating moisture, heat, mechanical loads, weathering, and carbon flows while remaining manufacturable at an architectural scale. These combined requirements shifted the research away from a single ideal formulation and toward a family of related wool biocomposites.

Processing variables—including fiber refinement, keratin content, citric acid concentration, pressure, and temperature—can be adjusted to produce substantially different material behaviors. High-density formulations prioritize stiffness and moisture resistance, achieving performance comparable to or better than that of wood products: a flexural modulus of 1,906 ± 194 MPa and water absorption of 24 ± 2.1 percent after 24 hours.9 Low-density formulations omit the final heat-pressing stage, retaining more insulating air within the fiber network and achieving a thermal conductivity of 0.045 ± 0.015 W·m-¹·K-¹, comparable to expanded polystyrene insulation.⁹

The exhibition structure, nicknamed The Stock Tank, gives physical expression to this material family as a prototype for a retrofittable insulation-and-cladding assembly. Ninety low-density panels form the thermal and acoustic layer, while ninety high-density panels create the exterior cladding surface. Fluting gives the rigid panels additional depth and stiffness while recalling the folded garments that Vitruvius associated with the Ionic column. The open rear of the installation allows visitors to enter the enclosure and experience the sudden attenuation of ambient sound produced by the low-density wool composite.

Retrofittable insulating-and-cladding assembly

The Stock Tank

Interior of the Stock Tank