The award-winning design hub, Mizzi Studio, has enjoyed a jam-packed few months, with “huge and exciting” leaps forward for the team, including broadening its international presence.
“We have been listening and learning from our time spent with a new community in Bali, understanding how the link between humanity and nature can be strengthened through a combination of both indigenous and technological design and construction innovations,” said its founder and director Jonathan Mizzi.
This has been married with the studio’s learnings back in Europe to bridge new knowledge with its long-standing definition and implementation of bio-architecture, the British-Maltese architect and designer said.
Among its new projects, Mizzi Studio has secured planning permission for a private eco spa, designed to sit within an expansive green site in Suffolk, in the UK.
The spa mimics a natural hillock, sitting harmoniously within a bucolic English country setting. Its dune-like form will reside on the edge of a naturally filtered pool, seemingly peeling up at its edges to reveal a timber façade.
Two interlinking domes will ascend from the earth, insulated by a grass roof, which returns the grassland to the natural habitat and welcomes visitors to step-up and enjoy elevated views.
The spa’s cross-laminated timber (CLT) construction and shingle cladding makes it a 99 per cent timber build, aiming for carbon neutrality through material selection, the utilisation of the earth’s insulation, photovoltaic panels, ground source heat pumps, and heat recovery systems to feed the spa facilities.
Bamboo-building movement
The entire Mizzi Studio family also took a team-building trip to Bali to participate in a bamboo-building workshop run by Bamboo U, an education enterprise that has grown out of Bali’s bamboo-building movement.
Working together with renowned design firm Ibuku, the organisation has been pioneering bamboo architecture for over 10 years, offering courses that share knowledge on bamboo design and sustainable architecture.
The Mizzi Studio team joined in one of the Bamboo U courses, flexing their craft-making muscles within Bali’s lush and warm setting.
Chamioning climate change
As part of an ongoing effort to support projects that champion climate action, Mizzi Studio has also invested in a biodigester NFT, known as the Su-re.com Biodigester.
The NFT forms part of a collection spearheaded by The Dungbeetle, a Bali-based company that aims to support small-scale carbon projects unable to afford certification from large accreditors.
The Dungbeetle was launched by 17-year-old Green School Bali student Freddie Hedegaard and partners, and was conceived as a company that could work with “authentic climate-friendly projects driven by the right reasons, not by big profits”.
The Dungbeetle authenticates eco-projects using NFT technology, identifying carbon projects and issuing them each with an NFT. It then sells this to other companies for the purpose of offsetting their own carbon footprint, with sale money going to the project owner.
Mizzi Studio’s newly purchased biodigester NFT helps to fund the Su-re.co’s Biodigester, which lets local farmers convert cow manure and food waste into biogas for stoves and organic fertiliser for crops.