RECKONstruct, the American pavilion at XXII Triennale di Milano, responds to the theme Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival, demonstrating how sustainable design can respond to the current global environmental crisis. Conceived and developed by a group of passionate environmental advocates including Arup, Humanscale, MIT’s SHINE Program, Novità Communications and NextWave Plastics, it spotlights the materials revolution underway in the United States and documents how Humanscale’s design studio reimagined a simple stool through three different approaches to sustainability, including bio-fabrication, circular economy, and biomimicry.

To measure the sustainability of each design, Humanscale partnered with MIT’s SHINE program—Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositve Enterprise. Evaluating all three designs using a comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) quantified impacts from materials sourcing to transportation to manufacturing to actual use.

An immersive film, produced by a Los Angeles–based team of engineers and designers at the global engineering firm Arup, contrasts the innovative design concepts with conventional manufacturing approaches, bringing the LCA to life within a backdrop of locations representative of how materials are sourced and used in the built environment.

RECKONstruct invites visitors to immerse themselves in a new circular economy, discovering the opportunities of the material life cycle as a call to collective and individual action.