- This is really a time where people are reassessing their priorities.

And I think a lot of that is in a good way.

We're seeing a lot of the pollution be cut down throughout the planet.

There's a lot of silver linings that we can look at now.

(upbeat music) My name is Chris Maurer, I'm an Architect.

I'm the Founder of Redhouse Studio, which is in Ohio City.

Redhouse Studio is an architecture firm, a research, collaborative and a humanitarian studio.

The COVID-19 crisis has slowed a lot of our research.

All of us at Red House are working from home at least in the architectural department.

Construction continues to go on as essential services to keep the economy running.

And those fortunately are activities that usually people can distance themselves while at work.

PPE was a known term to folks in construction before this, I think it's a new term to a lot of folks.

Years ago, up the biocycler, it was really about, using waste material to make new building materials.

That's still a major focus of what we're doing now, but we've realized that we can actually remediate it at the same time as recycle.

The fungi that we're using in the process can break down petrochemicals and we've come across some biological materials that can be added that can actually make things like heavy metals, including lead, be safe.

Things that should have never been in the built environment to begin with but unfortunately are.

And that's really important for us here in Cleveland, where children have four times the incidences of lead poisoning than the national average.

We're looking at these polluted environments and then turning the material from that into architecture, that's dignified and safe.

It's a method of creating environmental justice.

I think this crisis has actually made clear that the types of issues that we're looking into are needed now more than ever.

Some of the things that we're promoting are about bolstering local economies and making sure you have access to food and jobs and shelter, building materials.

And then when you go to the very far end of our research, when we're talking about living materials, we see a future where these materials could actually work like a fire detection and fire suppression system for contagions.

If we have a living architecture, it would be possible to actually identify viruses that are in our midst, maybe even eliminate it.

Because some of these materials we're looking at are probiotic, that's not just for kombucha anymore,(laughs) and it's not just for yogurt anymore.

That could be something that actually is in our environment with us and working symbiotically with humans.