The new avant-garde of construction isn’t chasing monuments. It’s reshaping matter, recalibrating space, and refusing the old binaries between architecture and material science. Whether through modular blocks grown from fungus or community halls pressed from desert dust, these creators are not merely responding to context—they’re redefining it.
Some engineer the future one fibre at a time. Others rethink how and why we inhabit space at all. Together, they signal a shift: away from extraction, toward systems that are local, regenerative, and quietly radical. Their work doesn't wave flags—it lays foundations.
Consider this a field guide to those changing the rules of what a building can be, and what it should be made of.
1. Angela Ruiz — Desert Bio-Construction
Angela explores architecture rooted in arid ecologies, crafting structures from esparto grass, desert dust, and lime-based materials. Her work seeks to revive forgotten building traditions in Spain's semi-desert zones.
What Tocco loves: Her buildings form symbiotic bonds with climate and landscape. They embrace impermanence, humility, and the fierce poetry of heat and sand.
2. Studio8 — Upcycled Structures
With their project *Matterpieces*, Studio8 reclaims construction debris to build poetic, brutalist-inspired spatial compositions in Vietnam.
What Tocco loves: Rather than hiding the past, they let waste tell its story. Their interiors are layered with history, warmth, and contradiction.
3. Mycohab — Mycelium Blocks
Mycohab produces modular mycelium blocks for architectural use, grown locally and designed for disassembly.
What Tocco loves: Their system isn't just sustainable—it's alive. It reflects a new paradigm of architecture as cultivation, not extraction.
4. Easy Housing — Affordable Prefab Housing
Their modular system brings low-cost, climate-adapted homes to underserved regions, especially in Africa.
What Tocco loves: It challenges the assumption that sustainable architecture is slow or expensive. It’s fast, thoughtful, and scalable.
→ Read the interview
5. EcoCocon — Climate-Positive Panels
These prefabricated panels are made from compressed straw, offering insulation, breathability, and carbon negativity.
What Tocco loves: They elevate straw from humble agricultural by-product to high-performance wall system.
6. Strong By Form — Biomimetic Wood
Using computational design and robotic milling, this Chilean studio reshapes wood into bone-like geometries that use less material with greater structural strength.
What Tocco loves: Their innovation transforms wood into something almost alien, yet completely natural. It's elegance through efficiency.
7. Hempitecture — Hemp Panels
American-made hemp insulation that supports regenerative agriculture and toxin-free interiors.
What Tocco loves: They reconnect construction to farming. Every panel is a bridge between soil and shelter.
8. Sustonable — PET & Glass Surfaces
This Spanish startup turns recycled PET bottles and glass into luxe, terrazzo-like surfaces.
What Tocco loves: Their slabs have tactility, story, and sparkle—proof that waste can be sensuous.
9. Respyre — Moss Facades
Respyre engineers moss-covered concrete for urban walls that filter air and retain biodiversity.
What Tocco loves: They’re building lungs for cities, not just facades. It’s biophilic design that breathes.
10. FMT Estudio — Through the Seasons
FMT Estudio designs buildings that echo the sensorial rhythm of Yucatán’s climate.
What Tocco loves: The structures feel like memories—warm stones, textured walls, filtered light. Architecture that listens.
11. FADAA — Cultural Eco-Build
In Morocco, FADAA reclaims earth, timber, and ancestral craft to build community spaces that honour place and memory.
What Tocco loves: It's not nostalgia. It’s a tactical revival of rooted, future-facing ways of building.
12. minD Design — Emotive Architecture
This Vietnamese studio choreographs emotional responses through material palettes and spatial softness.
What Tocco loves: They prove that sustainability isn’t only functional. It can be felt, subtle, and soulful.
13. Myconom — Acoustic Mushroom Panels
Myconom's mycelium-based panels absorb sound while showcasing natural textures and forms.
What Tocco loves: Acoustic design finally gets a biomaterial upgrade—soft to the eye, silent to the ear.
14. FRONT — Agricultural Waste into Elegance
Using corn COB and plant residues, FRONT crafts bio-based, beautiful wall panels.
What Tocco loves: Their work doesn’t scream eco—it whispers. It’s refinement with a regenerative backbone.
15. Søuld — Eelgrass Acoustics
Danish studio Sould transforms coastal eelgrass into acoustic wall systems.
What Tocco loves: Wild texture meets functional calm. It’s beachscape translated into design.
16. Applied Bioplastics — BioFi & Jutin from jute
This Texas-based team develops structural biocomposites made with jute and recycled plastics to cut carbon and enhance performance.
What Tocco loves: They’re not greenwashing plastic—they’re transforming it. Tough, clean, modular.
17. MANUFACTURA — TerraBlocks
Dinorah’s compressed earth blocks are used for versatile, load-bearing architecture in Mexico.
What Tocco loves: They honour vernacular traditions while responding to contemporary crises. A future made of soil.
18. We+ — Vibrant Palettes from Algae Pigments
The Japanese duo We+ use microalgae to create vivid, natural pigments for richly coloured surfaces in their SO-Colored project.
What Tocco loves: They expand the definition of bio-based beauty—colour that grows.
19. Téo Sandigliano — Design on the Periphery
Teo Sandigliano curates Peripheral Design to shift Milan’s design center, highlighting sustainable materials, waste reuse, and marginal urban spaces.
What Tocco loves: His practice is slow, quiet, and subversive. He builds with nuance, not noise.
20. UNISPACE — Human-Centric Workspaces
This global design firm foregrounds inclusivity, wellbeing and natural tactility using smart materials and circular practices to support well-being and business goals.
What Tocco loves: Their spaces feel lived-in from day one, welcoming, intuitive, quietly radical.
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Join the League.
What’s driving material decisions behind the scenes? Beyond the showrooms and strategy decks, Tocco believes the future is being shaped by those who touch the materials themselves—and those who dare to rethink them.
That’s why we created UNBOX: the world’s first portable material library for these pioneers. It’s our tactile research tool disguised as a product—a curated selection of next-gen materials from the world’s most promising innovators, packed into a portable format for designers, educators, and creators.
Check out UNBOX project here.
