The building industry has seen a number of innovations in recent times, including the easy configuration of interior spaces, the use of robots to make properties energy efficient, the use of drones to supervise building sites, houses made using 3D printing, temporary and portable housing in inner cities and even the automation of construction itself.

One area that I haven’t really looked at however is the bricks themselves, but a new project from researchers at the University of West of England promises to bring the humble brick into the 21st century.

21st century bricks

The researchers claim that the new bricks will be capable of doing everything from generating solar energy to recycling wastewater.

The bricks are part of the European ‘Living Architecture’ (LIAR) project that is being run in partnership with Newcastle University.  The aim of the project is to use new approaches to construction to help tackle sustainability issues.

The bricks themselves are made of bioreactors that are filled with microbial cells and algae, and they are designed to cope with a range of environmental conditions.  What’s more, they can monitor the air inside the building, and even recognize people inside.

The power of the bricks comes from the Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) contained within, which are capable of cleaning water, reclaiming phosphate and generating electricity.

“The technologies we are developing aim to transform the places where we live and work enabling us co-live with the building,” the team say.

“A building made from bio-reactors will become a large-scale living organism that addresses all environmental and energy needs of the occupants. Walls in buildings comprised of smart bricks containing bioreactors will integrate massive-parallel computing processors where millions of living creatures sense the occupants in the building and the internal and external environmental conditions,” they continue.

They suggest that a building made entirely of these bricks will be akin to a huge parallel computing processor.

What isn’t clear yet is just how cost-effective such bricks would be in comparison to existing house bricks.  It’s certainly an interesting example of just what’s possible however.