Cameron Penney’s MArch thesis project, Toronto’s Terrestrial Reef: Biorock’s Infrastructural Biogeochemical Futures, is an intensive material exploration of biorock— a carbon-sequestering, limestone-like, concrete alternative—to create a synthetic geo/ecological scaffold in urban Toronto. This essay focuses on a single project figure: a series of photographs of biorock models grown in a self-constructed wet lab and analyzed in a chemistry dry lab. Drawing from model histories in architecture and science, the essay suggests that as physical models increasingly detach from their conventional disciplinary roles, their capacity to make worlds—in this case a biogeochemical world of synthetic geological accretions—radically expands.

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