SYMBIO, Joris Laarman’s exhibition at Friedman Benda Gallery – Photos by Izzy Leung, courtesy of Friedman Benda and Joris Laarman Lab.

Design. Joris Laarman has always been drawn to the edges of what making can mean, and his latest solo exhibition at Friedman Benda is no exception. On until 24 June, the showcase pairs two bodies of work — Ply Loop and Symbio — in which computational methods and craft are woven into a single, coherent language.

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Plywood is not an obvious vehicle for reinvention, yet the Ply Loop chair, shelf and console manage precisely that. An innovative biodegradable resin unlocks geometries that the material has never before been asked to hold, while keeping the process non-toxic and renewable throughout. The results are quietly persuasive — objects that carry their research without announcing it.

Symbio operates at a different scale of ambition. These 3D-printed benches are cast in a concrete composite that permanently stores carbon rather than releasing it, already a significant departure from convention.

But Laarman goes further: recessed channels running through each piece hold a bio-active substrate from which mosses and lichens gradually emerge. The Symbio pieces are, in Laarman’s own words, “conceived as objects in active dialogue with their environment”, and the living surface that develops bears that out.

Following a reaction-diffusion pattern attributed to Alan Turing, the growth of moss and lichen becomes an image of symbiosis, where architecture and organism, computation and the organic, are no longer in opposition.

“The collections would have been unthinkable prior to our digital age,” the gallery observes, and both series are made entirely from materials that are either biodegradable or carry a positive carbon footprint. What Symbio ultimately proposes — and Ply Loop quietly seconds — is that accountability to materials need not come at the expense of beauty. If anything, it sharpens it.

All photos are by Izzy Leung, courtesy of Friedman Benda and Joris Laarman Lab.