Designed by Associate Professor Gustavo Crembil and alumna Mae-ling Lokko (RPI class 2016), Ileum is an architectural pavilion commissioned by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. The project opened in July and remained on view through October 2025 as part of HKW’s Shaped to the Measure of the People’s Songs series and the international heimaten: Festival for Plural Democracy. Named after the final section of the human small intestine, Ileum explores absorption, transformation, and repair—proposing architecture as an ecological interface rather than an inert object. The pavilion invites reflection on soil as a living system and as a repository of histories, waste, and renewal. Developed in collaboration with Berlin architects Frederik Fuchs and Matthias Weis (ephem), the pavilion references Berlin’s Großes Tropenhaus (1905), a colonial-era greenhouse built to display tropical flora. Lokko and Crembil reinterpret this precedent to foreground global entanglements of extraction and cultivation, reimagining architecture as a practice of repair, interdependence, and material justice. Ileum confronts architecture’s historical indifference to soil ecosystems by engaging pluriversal perspectives and material cycles. Replacing the Tropenhaus’s iron and glass structure with a freestanding timber frame, its composite panels are fabricated from by-products of twenty-first-century industries, including agriculture (rice husks, fly ash), metal manufacturing (ferro-silicon alloy waste), and renewable energy (recycled solar-panel glass fibers). Recovered cotton fibers sourced from the OR Foundation in Ghana’s Kantamanto Market—one of the world’s largest centers for secondhand textiles—are also integrated into the material palette, celebrating a discarded fabric once used intimately by humans to protect their bodies, line their beds, and cover their belongings. Ileum continues Lokko and Crembil’s ongoing collaboration at the intersection of ecological design, material research, and cultural reflection. Mae-ling Lokko, a Ghanaian-Filipino architect and Assistant Professor at Yale School of Architecture, focuses her research on upcycling agricultural waste and developing mycelium-based materials. Gustavo Crembil, an Argentine-American architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, investigates performative material systems and socio-technical design practices. Photos courtesy of Hanna Wiedemann / HKW Ileum pavilion credits: Designers: Mae-ling Lokko and Gustavo Crembil Architects: ephem (Frederik Fuchs and Matthias Weis), Berlin Design Production Team: Mae-ling Lokko, Gustavo Crembil, Oswaldo Chinchilla, and Alireza Zamani Samani Contractors: Factum Panel Manufacturing Partners: Ricehouse Benefit Corporation, Opovate Ltd., and OR Foundation Ghana