I had the good fortune to catch up with architect Magnus Larsson who was in my agency recently to talk about his rather ambitious landscape design project. After failing his architecture degree first time round Magnus was devastated. However, in a truly inspiring fashion he returned the following and blew everyone out of the water with this project.

To combat the Sahara Desert’s ongoing growth, his idea proposed an insane 6,000km wall that will be constructed by letting a bacterium have its way with the sand, forming sandstone.

The idea is to stop the desert using the desert itself.

The sand grains would be bound together using a bacterium called Bacillus pasteurii commonly found in wetlands. It is a microorganism which chemically produces calcite – a kind of natural cement.

I fully recommend heading over to BLDGBLOG and finding out more abut this project. Hopefully TED will upload his talk soon too.