The Weight of What We Build: Making Architecture’s Hidden Impact Visible
When we walk through a city, step into a new home, or admire a freshly completed building, we rarely pause to consider the invisible costs embedded in its walls. Beyond concrete, steel, and glass lies a burden of emissions, waste, and ecological depletion. What does a building really weigh?
At Dutch Design Week 2025, LX Design Studio will invite visitors to confront this question with The Weight of What We Build. This immersive installation transforms abstract environmental data into a sensory experience. Here, materials are no longer silent. They reveal their hidden stories through textures, sounds, and smells, asking us to rethink the future of design.
A Modular Space That Speaks
The installation is framed like scaffolding: a universal symbol of construction. Instead of enclosing work in progress, it becomes a stage for reflection. Real materials, arranged in a modular structure, are presented not as neutral samples but as characters in a narrative. Visitors move through three distinct zones: Burden, Reflection, and Regeneration.
Scaffolding is deliberate. It suggests that building is never finished, that society is always under construction. It also emphasizes transparency. What we usually hide behind walls becomes exposed, raw, and tactile.
Zone 1: Burden
Every building carries a weight that is rarely visible. In the first zone, visitors encounter the hidden costs of construction: embodied carbon, demolition waste, and toxicity.
Familiar materials are stripped of their neutral showroom gloss and presented as unsettling encounters. Sharp textures cut against the skin, chemical smells sting the nose, and heavy soundscapes echo industrial extraction. Curtains mark thresholds and shift atmospheres, intensifying the sense of unease.
Burden makes the invisible visible. It asks: What is the real cost of our comfort? Who or what pays the price when we build this way?
Zone 2: Reflection
Stepping forward, the atmosphere softens. Here, the installation becomes a pause for contemplation.
Natural and biobased materials replace the harshness of Zone 1. Earthy smells, muted light, and acoustic calm create a meditative space. Visitors are invited to reflect not only on materials but on their own relationship to the built environment.
This zone recalls traditions of craft and care, where construction was not only technical but cultural. It contrasts sharply with the heaviness of Burden and offers a glimpse of an alternative path where architecture supports well-being instead of extracting from it.
Zone 3: Regeneration
The final zone turns toward possibility. Here, materials embody renewal: fungal composites, plant-based plastics, recycled aggregates. Visitors are encouraged to touch, smell, and even taste, engaging all senses in imagining architecture that regenerates instead of depletes. Light filters through translucent bioplastics, and textures invite exploration rather than caution. A Material Passport accompanies the experience, recording impressions and linking to ecological data via QR codes. The goal is to bridge emotional encounter with factual knowledge, leaving visitors with both memory and insight. This zone is lighter, more open, and deliberately hopeful. It asks not what we must stop doing but what we can begin to build instead.
Why This Matters
Construction is one of the most resource-intensive industries on the planet. It accounts for nearly 40% of global carbon emissions, generates massive amounts of waste, and often locks us into linear, toxic systems.
LX Design Studio believes that design must shift from extraction to regeneration. Technical solutions already exist: circular materials, low-carbon construction methods, reuse systems. Yet they often remain hidden in reports, data sheets, or policy documents.
The Weight of What We Build takes a different approach. It uses sensory design to make these issues tangible. Smells, textures, and sounds communicate more viscerally than graphs or numbers ever could. The installation reminds us that we do not just live in buildings. We absorb their presence every day.
Behind the Scenes
The project is led by Lobna Elgheriani, founder and designer at LX Design Studio, together with Marius Müller as project manager and Sevval Kayhan on the production team.
The installation is part of a broader practice at LX Design Studio that combines sustainability, storytelling, and sensory design. With The Weight of What We Build, the studio extends its research into material passports, biobased construction, and modular exhibition systems.
Partnerships with material innovators and sustainability platforms ensure that the installation is not only artistic but also deeply connected to real-world change.
Visit at Dutch Design Week 2025
The Weight of What We Build will be presented at Ketelhuisplein, Strijp-S, Eindhoven, during Dutch Design Week 2025 (October 18–26).
Visitors are invited to step inside, move through the three zones, and contribute their impressions to the evolving Material Passport. The installation is partially wheelchair accessible, tactile, and child-friendly, designed to engage a wide audience.
Toward New Futures of Design
In the end, The Weight of What We Build is less about materials themselves and more about the stories they carry. By confronting the burden of construction, pausing for reflection, and opening toward regeneration, the installation suggests that building differently is both possible and necessary. It is a call to designers, builders, and citizens alike to imagine futures where architecture does not weigh us down but lifts us forward.