Lyndah Katusiime is a graduate architect, researcher, and photojournalist passionate about reshaping the future of human habitats. Specialising in modular, temporary, and bio-architecture, she is redefining traditional built environments through innovative design and sustainable practices. Her research focuses on regenerative materials in architecture, experimenting with biomaterials and upcycled waste such as cassava-based bioplastics, water hyacinth composites, cow dung, earth, and construction waste. She envisions a future where architecture harmonises seamlessly with nature, fostering a symbiotic relationship between people, materials, and their surroundings while addressing global challenges like climate change and resource scarcity.
On Earth, Cassava, and Water Hyacinth
Essay on Lyndah Katusiime’s 32° East Residency
by Catherine Lie
Walking into Lyndah Katusiime’s studio, one isn’t quite sure whether they’re stepping into a kitchen, a laboratory, or an artist’s studio. Her work unfolds through a daily choreography of peeling, slicing, blending—activities that feel more at home in a communal kitchen than in a conventional art space. Yet, the results, broths; crumbs, translucent gels, suggest an alchemical world between everyday cooking and rigorous material experimentation.
Continuing the research she began while developing “Care Instructions” for KLA ART’24 Festival by 32° East, Living Pavilion—a multidimensional structure centering community maintenance and sustainability—Lyndah now dives deeper into Uganda’s everyday vegetations: cassava and water hyacinth. Her focus has shifted toward biomaterials, without losing the community-centered ethos that grounds her practice. As she often says, “building is a communal act.” Much like the slow, collective processes required to transform raw ingredients into meals, Lyndah works to make material production faster, cheaper, and more accessible.
Trained as an architect and researcher, Lyndah’s creative pursuit stems from a pragmatic desire: to address the scarcity of affordable, sustainable materials, a concern she first encountered during her undergraduate thesis on postdisaster housing. Her research approach was shaped during her time working with Ugandan architect Doreen Adengo, fueling her curiosity for what she calls “more-than-architecture”—spaces where building, biology, and storytelling entangle.
Her material palette merges the innovations of figures like Localworks, Francis Kéré and Neri Oxman: architects who straddle local vernacular traditions and futuristic material science. Building from these legacies, Lyndah’s bioplastics extend this dialogue, forging a language of their own—one that plays with translucency and color. From cassava mixed with hibiscus and other natural dyes, blue, purple, turquoise, and orange hues emerge, suggesting a world of new possibilities for non-toxic materials. Organized into modular panels, sheets, and tiles, her biomaterials gesture toward architecture, yet toward softer, dreamier worlds of plasticity.
If earthen architecture speaks the language of solidity and permanence, and futurist architecture screams biomimicry, Lyndah’s biomaterials speak in a different register: ephemeral, delicate, almost edible. Translucent gels, porous fringes, chewy bricks—they extend the tactile intimacy of traditional materials like stone and earth, and at the same timenresisting the detached, imposing aesthetics of futurism, proposing a new material vocabulary for collective building.
Alongside these tactile experiments are compelling visual studies emerging from her photographic practice:
microscope-like images revealing the microstructures of cassava bioplastic, delicate documentation of material transformations, and a project journal formatted like a recipe book. These “care instructions” don’t prescribe, but invite collective interpretation—waiting to be developed, adapted, and shared within her community.
Lyndah’s work is both inventive and sensitive, playful yet deeply intentional. In a world where sustainability is often reduced to buzzwords, her practice insists on something quieter, more durable, more grounding: a return to process, to collective care, to the intimacy of transformation.
Visitors to Lyndah’s open studio are invited not just to see, touch, and smell, but to imagine: how might we care for materials, communities, and futures differently?
Catherine Lie is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, and educator
from Jakarta, Indonesia based in Brooklyn and Mexico City
