The Dutch government recently announced it’s investing €200 million in fostering the development of biobased building materials. What could this mean for design and architecture? What can other countries learn from the example? And what should we be wary of in the process? Pascal Leboucq, head of design at Biobased Creations – a creative studio that specializes in creating physical stories to promote circular and biobased developments – shares his thoughts on the programme, and explains why the world needs a localized approach to biomaterials.

The €200 million will be invested in, among other things, setting up chains and production lines. What do we need to know about this? What impact will it have on design and architecture? 

PASCAL LEBOUCQ: Most farmland in the Netherlands is dedicated to corn and a small amount of other grains for the meat industry, and most of the meat is for the international market. This government programme, called Building Balance, is about finding ways to dedicate at least 1 or 2 per cent of the area we have to biobased materials. To make these transitions happen, we have to create awareness and show what’s possible in terms of different forms because the current applications are mainly food-based. We have to think smartly about how the abundance of food-industry side streams – not to be confused with waste streams – can be used to create building materials. There’s also a focus on investing in biobased materials for the textile, product and construction industries, but we need to raise awareness among farmers – to showcase the different kinds of products you can make with the likes of hemp or flax. In the Netherlands, there are currently more constructors motivated to use biobased materials in their projects than there are local sources. We really have to motivate farmers to grow these crops, because biobased material producers here are currently getting their supplies from Northern and Eastern Europe. It’s also about trust and collaboration. The farmers need the guarantee that they can deliver their supplies to the industry or directly to the builders, otherwise it’s a very tricky business case. 

Photo: martin wengelaar

Pascal Leboucq.

Farming is a very important part of the chain, but this programme is also about creating chains: between farmers, industry and builders. I think the most difficult part is the industry, because it costs many millions to invest in new factories, and the industry will move if there’s a guarantee it has enough local sources but also enough contractors to buy the products. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. The Building Balance programme’s first strategy is to create more volume, more crops, from farmers. And to see how we can implement these fibres in buildings in a very low-tech way, without investing millions in new factories. This means more insulation applications – you can blow the fibres between your walls. It’s an easy start, but it’s not the best long-term strategy – we have to be more careful and more selective about which parts of the plants we implement in which kinds of products. That’s why one of our presentations showcased all the different applications you can make from one plant. Another important thing is that the government is currently focusing on crops that grow on dry land, like flax and hemp. But there are a lot of wetlands, especially in the Netherlands and Belgium, which means you also have to grow more reeds and willows. If we focus only on dry-land crops, we’re not aligning with how the Dutch landscape really works and are creating monocultures, just as we now do with corn. We need a much more diverse story and vision. At Biobased Creations, we really want to create this awareness, because human beings always try to make things as efficient as possible, but we have to redesign our own landscape, and not only change the crops. Our Possible Landscapes project is a holistic vision of how to design new cultural landscapes – ones that focus on biobased crops, of course.

Biobased Creations is more about inspiration than actual products. Why?

The approach comes from my personal drive as a spatial designer. I always design from the materials, whereas typically the architecture happens first – someone designs their house, say, and then thinks about the materials afterwards. But I believe materials have an identity, a location, a landscape, a story – just like food is connected to the soil in which it grows. We first did The Growing Pavilion, four years ago. It considered mycelium as a network that grows in nature. You can also build biobased materials with it, but it can be so much more – we can work with nature more innovatively than we do now. In the Netherlands, there are a lot of bio-designers. As an organization, we want to connect the knowledge and the network, as mycelium does in nature, and The Growing Pavilion was the first representation of this desire. It focused on mycelium and fungi because fungi have bad connotations in terms of health, but as human beings our nature is fungi. Yes, fungi can be dangerous in some situations, but they can also be very powerful and helpful. We wanted to create a new vision and shift mindsets.

Photo: Eric Melander

A collaboration between Biobased Creations and Dutch Design Foundation, the 95% circular Growing Pavilion was constructed from wood, mycelium, residual flows from agriculture, bulrush and cotton.

When you say connecting ‘the knowledge and the network’, what kinds of people and organizations are you talking about?

First, it’s about bringing the designers together, because if you’re in the R&D phase, it can often feel like you’re alone on an island. But something we focused on more in subsequent projects is connecting the design and construction industries because they’re not really collaborating. Creating that connection is where the innovation starts. As curators of The Embassy of Circular & Biobased Building during Dutch Design Week, we really brought these worlds together – as an invitation but also as a critique to designers. To help them realize they should think bigger than one lampshade or stool. The Exploded View, a project we did two years ago, was a house-shaped exhibition made of 100 different biobased materials. That was a step to connect designers and start-ups to the worlds of industry and construction. We also partner with the government and the industry, and now we’re focusing more on farmers, as we showed during Dutch Design Week 2023 with Possible Landscapes. Connecting designers, farmers and the construction world is the chain you need to make a bigger impact. For us, Dutch Design Week is a very important platform because it’s a big design festival. But we really want to start conversations with all these local parties, which means you have to take the installations to the rural parts of the Netherlands to have the discussion there. The work we make is not just for presenting our visions but as a tool for starting dialogues.

Featured at Dutch Design Week 2023, maquette installation Possible Landscapes focused on visions for profitable farmland, with wet crops and modular, biobased homes.

You’re taking these ideas further and will culminate them in a regenerative pavilion at Dutch Design Week 2025. What’s the plan?

We’re focusing on different landscapes in the Netherlands and different types of soils, like river clay grounds or sea clay grounds. Together with local designers, builders and farmers, we will research how to create scenarios for future cultural landscapes. By bringing different ideas together in an abstraction of the Dutch landscape, we will make the statement that you can’t create one vision, one strategy, for an entire country, because it needs different strategies. Since cities can also be considered landscapes, we’re researching regenerative building methods as well – how to create buildings that are not just CO2 neutral but create a better environment for the water, soil and air. How a façade can store water during droughts but also filter it and return it to the environment. How to implement local soil on rooftops to grow local plants and fungi. How to create nature-inclusive building systems with biobased material solutions.

We’ve talked a lot about the Netherlands, but what can designers in other countries learn from this?

We will also do a bigger Possible Landscapes research project in different countries in Europe. But whether you live in the Netherlands, the UK or China, the idea is the same. And it’s not a new idea. It’s going back to what we did 80 to 100 years ago. We’ve had a lot of interest from China, which has started a big biobased innovation movement. I truly believe you need the combination of design power, industry and agriculture. And in a lot of countries, these elements are more present than in the Netherlands, because there’s not a lot of industry here; it’s more an export-focused farming country. Each landscape needs its own vision, but in general, every country should focus on creating local innovative landscapes and collaborating more with local people.

Cover image: Render of the entry for the Dutch Pavilion at World Expo Osaka 2025, by team Building Sustainable Landscapes. Design by Group A, Karres & Brands and Biobased Creations.