The Ventnor Brickworks

Nature has the power to offer symbiotic connections with material production, but our current relationship with natural resources is one of exploitation rather than collaboration. The Ventnor Brickworks tells a story of how we might revert our conditioned ideas of what that relationship looks like by taking a costly waste stream of kelp and turning it into valuable construction materials for global and local contexts. The Ventnor Brickworks is a new form of distributed, low energy, low cost production of eco-friendly building materials. With the innovative addition of kelp as a key ingredient, energy savings are made across the entire brick making process. The resulting product is a carbon-negative building material with comparative strength of clay bricks, displaying impressive insulating properties, and a more sustainable life cycle. The Brickworks fits inside a standard 12m shipping container. This modular form reduces cost of set-up, creates distributed, mobile and deliverable manufacturing hubs, and takes the production right to the source of the raw elements. This enables places like Ventnor to redefine their relationship with a costly waste stream, to produce valuable assets.The Ventnor Brickworks: building a sustainable future, brick by brick.