In North London, a greenhouse has become a music venue for cacti. This is where the musicians sit and play for the plants, Elki Guillen explained. Sometimes we invite humans, but its mainly for the plants. Guillen is the guardian of the cactus house at Londons Wolves Lane Centre in Haringey, a community food growing center on a site home to a series of 1970s greenhouses that were once owned and run by the local council. Guillen found the nearly abandoned cactus house after borough authorities had seemingly forgotten about the whole facility, became the guardian of the cacti, and now uses the greenhouse to continue his research into the possibilities of cacti as a food source and building material. Today, the Wolves Lane Centre is a wild, fertile fantasy land where plants take center stage. The existing greenhouses have now taken on new community uses. Next to Guillens cactus house is a greenhouse used by Black Rootz, a Black-led growers collective that supplies fresh, locally sourced produce to customers and communities. And next door, three greenhouses grow produce for Ottolenghis Rovi restaurant in Mayfair. At the other end of the site is a wild and verdant palm house, complete with a koi pond and terrapin turtles.Internal walls are constructed from strocks, unfired earth blocks made from clay-rich earth and chopped straw. ( Henry Woide)Haringey Council leases the site to the Wolves Lane Consortium, which is made up of Organiclea, Crop Drop, and the Ubele Initiative. The group commissioned Material Cultures and Studio Gil to create a masterplan for the site to introduce three new buildings: a community hall designed by Studio Gil plus an office space and workshop with a cold store, both designed by Material Cultures. These buildings support the activities of the consortium and initiatives like Black Rootz while also embodying the grassroots approach of Ubele and Material Cultures.Local Materials, Deep WallsIn Material Culturess 2022 book, Material Reform, the practice, with co-author Amica Dall, describes how it centers the people from whom value is extracted as they supply their labour by digging, hauling, packing, processing and assembling. The authors make the case for a local architecture made with local materials, local methods, and local workers. The ideas in the book posed important questions two years ago, but they seemed far away from the current systems of construction in the U.K. that revolve around concrete, steel, and petrochemical industries. It takes time to convert ideas into practice, so now at Wolves Lane Centre these thoughts are realized in clay, straw, lime, timber, and chalk.Straw bales sit within a lightweight timber frame that rests on a regular fired brick plinth. ( Henry Woide)We think that these various different materials that you can gather up from the landscape around you are the future, Material Culturess Paloma Gormley told me while on site. The methods that Material Cultures have been refining are on show from the ground up. The trench foundations are filled with the crushed concrete slabs from the existing site. Foam glass insulationrecycled material often sourced from windscreen glasssits beneath a limecrete floor. Straw bales, taken from nearby fields, sit within a lightweight timber frame that rests on a regular fired brick plinth. On the exterior, wood wool insulation boards are fixed to the wall, which are then directly faced with a pigmented lime render and a hardy scratch coat finish. The internal faces of the straw bale walls are rendered with clay and straw from the site mixed with sand and chalk, a process that the local community was able to learn through workshops hosted by Ubele and Will Stanwix. Internal walls are constructed from strocks, unfired earth blocks made from clay-rich earth and chopped straw, developed by brickmaker H.G. Matthews. This super-material has the same loadbearing capacity as brick and is antimicrobial and hygroscopic, meaning it draws moisture out of the air. Unlike so many modern building products that off-gas noxious fumes, the blocks sequester VOCs like formaldehyde.An agricultural steel cladding tops the facade and ties it together with the nearby greenhouses. ( Henry Woide)The resulting material palette is literally sourced from the site. Above the windows and doors, an agricultural steel cladding tops the facade and ties it together with the nearby greenhouses. Plant-based methods of construction naturally involve much deeper wall and floor thicknesses than the carbon-heavy methods and oil-based insulations that we have become accustomed to, so the deep reveals of the windows at Wolves Lane Centre become wonderful spaces to inhabit. Window frames are justified either to the exterior or interior faces of the walls, which means the sills alternate offering seating either to inside or outside users. This arrangement brings the building to life. An Exhibition of Biodiverse DesignThat buildings should be living, breathing organisms that grow from the landscape, and become together with it, is a thread that runs through Material Culturess work. Seen together, it asks how we can find a form of construction that is biodiverse and regenerative.Before the industrialization of our woodlands, and before the enclosures of the common lands, woodlands were the sources of multiple materials, and they supported numerous livelihoods, Material Culturess Summer Islam said about Woodland Goods, the outfits recently opened exhibition at the V&A South Kensington. (It runs through October.) On display are the studios experiments with the overlooked resources that woodlands provide: natural glues from the lignin in bark; sheet materials from pine needles and bioresins; and regenerative cladding that harnesses the waterproof properties of bark that is often mulched, chipped or discarded.Woodland Goods displays the studios experiments with the overlooked resources that woodlands provide. (Rachael Milliner)Material Cultures took the familiar form of an Aalto plywood stool and replaced the top with pressed birch and sequoia, still rough and textured. Today these materials are flawed, they are hairy, and they are prone to sprouting shoots, Islam offered, but they also ask questions about how we cultivate and extract from our woodlands an increasingly scarce material world.Organic and GrowingMaterial Culturess practice is anchored in the landscape and the community that land can create. The studio is forging a post-carbon path in an industry that seems tightly locked into the use of steel, concrete, and petrochemicals. These materialsand their supply chains, distribution centers, and lobbyistshave over time become so closely linked to national and global economies that somehow taking what we have available locally and using our hands to fashion it into shelters has become prohibitively difficult and expensive. These norms come with regulatory concerns of building codes, local inspectors, lending banks, and insurance companies that further entrench the bias against low-carbon construction methods and make policy and industry change seem impossible. Material Cultures shows us that another way is possible.Material Cultures tweaked the familiar form of an Aalto plywood stool, using pressed birch and sequoia (Courtesy V&A)As an alternative, Wolves Lane Centre is organic and growing. Future phases of construction are planned, but the spaces themselves are still evolving. As Sarah Ebanja from Ubele says, Buildings are buildings, but actually they come to life with how people use it as their home.Ellen Peirson is a London-based writer, editor, and designer.