CHARBORN - Time Capsule of Life
Category: Furniture
Competitions: Home Competition 2026
Since the earliest stages of human existence, societies have practiced death rites, embedding the passing of loved ones within emotional, spiritual, and symbolic frameworks surrounding the cycle of life. Yet contemporary funerary practices such as burial and cremation have become increasingly entangled with environmental challenges, contributing to carbon emissions, deforestation, land-use pressures, and water contamination, placing these rites increasingly out of tune with life itself. In response, this project proposes a bio-integrated burial rite that reimagines death not as preservation, but as transformation and return. At its center is CHARBORN, a capsule crafted from a novel plastic, developed in collaboration with Imperial College London. The material is born from waste streams: PHA, a bioplastic fermented by microbes from plant residues, enriched with biochar. Biochar is made by pyrolyzing waste wood into a stable form of carbon. The production process is energy neutral, and the resulting plastic is therefore carbon-sequestering. Blended and shaped into a capsule, the material becomes both medium and message. This vessel accompanies the human body through different states of existence: carrying it throughout life in the form of a chaise longue, receiving it in death as a coffin, and returning it to nature by aiding its decay. Fully biodegradable, the piece offers an intimate enclosure while quietly nourishing the soil, made possible by the regenerative properties of the embedded biochar.
