About the project
Gabe Tavas works full-time as the founder and CEO of Symmetry Wood, an early-stage biotech company that is the first to ever create solid wood from bacterial cellulose waste (sourced especially from the kombucha industry). The wood, Pyrus™, is geared as a replacement for tropical hardwoods.
Gabe graduated recently as part of the first class of the Master in Design for Distributed Innovation (MDDI), which focuses on enabling localized circular economies around the world and is tied closely to the Fab City Initiative and Maker Movement. He is also one of the first graduates with a Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Design from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
An independent, creative designer and entrepreneur developing design projects for exhibitions and commercial ventures since 2015. Gabe’s purpose in life is to empower designers and makers to protect their cultural and natural resources! Wood conservation, food biodiversity, and river restoration are of the highest interest to him.
Rivers are truly essential to life on Earth and key pillars of biodiversity. Of the 500+ cities with populations numbering over a million people, at least 60% of them exist along a river. However, these same rivers have been subjected to severe pollution and habitat degradation. To help reverse the damage, Gabe created a final project in his graduate studies at IAAC that proposes the installation of biobased wetlands. Essentially, plants are grown in floating mycelium platforms — formed from organic or construction waste — and staked with willow branches grafted and weaved underwater to hold freshwater mussels. The floating plants get water and nutrients, the mycelium acts as an effective substrate for algae, and the mussels receive shelter and food that enable them to filter contaminated water. It is a neat example of “symbiotic design”, where each component has a positive, interchanging effect on the others.