Abstract

Saline Dome investigates how architecture can emerge through the collaboration of salt crystallisation, microbial mineralisation, and computational form-finding. Located in a degraded inland salt-lake landscape in China, the project treats salt as an active non-human medium rather than an inert building material: it grows, collapses, repairs, and records environmental change. The design combines a cluster of dome frameworks translated from site parameters with layered salt-crystallisation fields that organically envelop along them, forming a hybrid system between ecological habitat, mineral scaffold, and limited human occupation. Salt-lake microbial communities participate in biomineralisation processes, helping to stabilise saline crusts and immobilise heavy-metal pollution within the structure. Rather than imposing a fixed architectural form, the project establishes environmental conditions for gradual growth, decay, and reinforcement over time. In this way, it rethinks human control in architecture and explores architecture as a continuously negotiated medium between machines, materials, organisms, and climate.