Rosa Whiteley on shells and creating a new building material.

Material Matters with Grant Gibson

Rosa Whiteley is a designer, writer and researcher, who trained as an architect at Manchester School of Architecture and the Royal College of Art.

Subsequently, she has worked within Cooking Sections, the Turner Prize nominated design and art collective, as a project manager and lead researcher and, since 2021, she has been the director of Material Research for CLIMAVORE CIC, which is a long-term, site-responsive project, exploring how to eat as humans change climates.

As part of her practice, she has been working on the islands of Skye and Raasay in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland, to develop building materials from waste seashells.

In this episode she discusses: how CLIMAVORE promotes alternative ways of eating and living; issues around salmon fishing; the creation of a ‘multi-species intertidal table’ (and what exactly that might be); encouraging local restaurants to stop serving salmon and use bivalves instead; how that created a surfeit of shells; using the shells to create lime mortar and making tiles; worries around the circular economy; training as an architect but not wanting to build; and the politics of air and atmospheres.

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