For a planet that has existed for billions of years, humans have occupied it for only a brief flicker of time. Yet we’ve acted as though the world revolves around our needs, our intelligence, our sense of order. That inherited confidence in our centrality has shaped everything from our cities to our systems, often without question. It’s this deeply embedded anthropocentric lens that Factory 5.0 by Studio Aditya Mandlik challenges.

At Dutch Design Week 2025, where the theme 'Past. Present. Possible.' encourages designers to reimagine the arc of progress, the studio poses the question: what if buildings weren’t designed by humans alone? Factory 5.0, their installation within the festival’s prestigious Grand Projects program, takes that idea and runs wild with it by sharing this authorship with worms. For an Indian architecture studio to debut an architectural pavilion in the Netherlands is a milestone in itself; for that pavilion to propose a future shaped by interspecies collaboration marks an even sharper shift in how architecture might imagine its future.

Factory 5.0 positions itself at the threshold of the Fifth Industrial Revolution, a moment defined by the merging of human and non-human intelligence. The project traces a conceptual arc from the first industrial revolution and the invention of plastic to our current reckoning with material excess. The studio reframes it as an opportunity: a chance to rethink construction as a metabolising process where ecological agents play an active role. This is where the worms come into the picture as co-workers in a shared architectural production line.

The installation imagines what architecture might become if it aligned itself with ecological processes rather than human intention alone. Biological agents, particularly worms capable of metabolising plastic, become collaborators in reshaping material. The form still echoes industrial-era assembly lines and capital-driven tooling, but the logic driving it is inverted. Factory 5.0 takes the familiar mechanisms of production and rewires them from within, suggesting a future where design moves with, rather than against, the intelligence embedded in natural systems.

Materially, the pavilion consists of 546 digitally fabricated composite timber components paired with 200 Styrofoam plates. These plates are intentionally exposed to decomposition inside transparent acrylic chambers housing 10,000 king worms. As visitors move around and through the structure, they witness a strange duet. The timber framework carries engineered intent; the decaying Styrofoam, slowly consumed by the worms, introduces a shifting interior landscape that can’t be fully controlled. Light filters through the pavilion in angular strokes, amplifying the sense that the installation is never quite the same from one moment to the next. In this way, Factory 5.0 behaves like a living organism negotiating its own spatial evolution.

This time-based transformation becomes a metaphor for an architectural practice attuned to cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration. Every element of the pavilion is designed for disassembly — flat-packed, shipped, reconfigured. Even the acrylic boxes act almost like silica gel, absorbing moisture and adjusting to different environments. After the exhibition, the pavilion will continue its life elsewhere: its components repurposed, its worm-altered Styrofoam plates preserved as “objects of memory,” later cast into metal lights and other objects. The project suggests a future where materials move through generations, and where architecture understands itself as part of a metabolic loop rather than a monument to permanence.

This speculative but deeply intentional approach reflects the ethos of Studio Aditya Mandlik. Based in Mumbai and also known as SAM — an acronym that expands to 'Space and Matter — the studio envisions a post-anthropocentric world shaped by metabolic design. Their work pulls from architecture, ecology, biology, and technology to imagine spaces that coexist with their environments instead dominating them. In Factory 5.0, that vision crystallizes into a world where human and non-human intelligence shape the built environment together towards a future rooted in symbiosis.

Follow Studio Aditya Mandlik here.

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