Key Points
In a former railway repair shop in the southern French city of Arles, flasks of lurid green algae are bubbling away on a shelf, in a room that looks like a cross between a modern-day laboratory and a witchs potion-brewing den..
Some of the walls appear to be made of rice cakes, others look like Weetabix, while some are daubed with a coat of porridgy gloop..
Elsewhere, there are antibacterial door handles made of salt, harvested from the regions salt marshes; thermal insulation made from bales of local rice straw; and bathroom tiles made of waste clay from a nearby quarry...
Internal walls are made from rammed earth using a recipe that incorporates demolition debris and limestone dust from local quarries, mixed with white clay to create a concrete-like finish with all the strength of that material but little of the embodied carbon...
There is sunflower pith wallpaper in the restaurant, algae bioplastic tiles in the loos, and crusty salt cladding in the lift lobby all seductive touches, but they do little to mitigate the untold tonnes of carbon emitted by the steel, concrete and glass leviathan that towers above.21..
