Made in Digital — The Sponge Building

Made in Digital is a mixed-use architectural demonstrator at the gates of Paris, conceived as a sponge building: an architecture that absorbs, filters and redistributes air, water, energy, data and people.

Inspired by the structure of natural sponges, the building behaves less like an object and more like an urban organism. It cleans, connects and activates its environment while hosting a dense ecosystem of work, production, culture and social life.

There is no front and no back. The building is visible from all sides, acting as a metropolitan marker at Porte de Bagnolet. By reconnecting street level, elevated slab and public terraces, it stitches together fragmented urban layers and turns residual infrastructure into civic space.

Its active bio-digital façade combines vertical vegetation with a 3D-printed concrete lattice, filtering polluted air, treating greywater, protecting from heat and supporting biodiversity. The façade is both biological and computational — one of the first architectural façades in France produced at full scale using 3D concrete printing.

Inside, highly flexible coworking spaces, a digital fablab, startup incubator, cooklab and public programs form a productive social machine. On the roof, an aquaponic greenhouse produces food and transforms the building into a lighthouse by night.

Made in Digital proposes a shift:
Architecture not as image, but as infrastructure.
Not static, but performative.
Not isolated, but deeply urban.

A building that modifies the city’s metabolism.