The Frisian landscape in the Netherlands is shaped by diverse, shifting terrains of meadows, ditches, terps and farms. Considered one of the most threatened habitats in the northern hemisphere, the peat meadows of the region are both wild and cultivated. They're crawling with critters and covered in reeds. Encompassing over 90,000 hectares, these habitats are being exploited for intensive agriculture and dairy farming, thus causing the land to erode and subside. However, these muddy, waterlogged topographies are essential ecosystems, acting as carbon sinks, regulating the climate, maintaining water quality and acting as buffers for floods and droughts. Repairing the destruction caused to these landscapes by human intervention and climate change requires a spirit of collaboration not just among the local communities dwelling on the terrain, but with the non-human species that depend on it. It necessitates an acknowledgement of nature as a living entity, not simply a resource to be extracted. As Henriette Waal hopes to demonstrate, it is through this very approach—championing collaboration across species and scales—that we can begin to imagine regenerative futures for the peat meadows, sustaining them against the tide of inevitable ruin.

The multi-hyphenate Waal, self-styled as an eco-social designer, has developed plural perspectives on environmental design and community engagement through artistic interventions in her interdisciplinary practice. The programmes under her curation underscore ecological responsibility and conscious consumption practices. Waal is also the co-founder of Atelier LUMA, the bio-design lab of the LUMA Foundation in the south of France, that champions bioregional models of operation and material innovation. Demarcated by territories in which specific interspecies' relationships can be discerned, bioregions provide distinct assemblages to understand the socio-ecological systems of a place. Each place is unique and provides particular material conditions through which life can thrive on that land. It’s a fine balance that is often skewed by human intervention, something practices of bioregioning hope to realign. From this, it’s easy to gauge the vast scale and diversity of Waal’s practice; thinking with entire ecologies and the networks they proliferate while advocating for a hands-on approach to making and building. By focusing on the local, her collaborative methods of design hope to create change that resonates at large scales.

Atelier LUMA’s model of innovation and prototyping is a paradigm of this form of thinking, rooted in place and conscious of our footprint on the earth. As Waal notes in an introspective conversation with STIR, “I think innovation often comes from who works together and what expertise they bring.” In 2016, Waal joined the LUMA foundation as a research director to conceptualise a programme that would bring together designers, engineers, scientists and experts from the cultural, craft, human and social sciences to explore the underlying potential of natural, non-extractive materials such as invasive plants, algae and even industrial waste found in the region. The aim was to experiment with these unconventional resources to work towards more eco-conscious practices of production. Waal's interest in the Camargue marshes emerged from a fascination with flamingoes and how their bright pink feathers are the result of the algae they consume. This became a revelation, prompting Waal to question how designers could collaborate with scientists to use biological knowledge in design applications, thus engendering practices that are natural and not extractive.

Several biomaterial prototypes that Waal stewarded along with creative professionals, scientists and most vitally, the local flora and fauna, became the building blocks for a renovation project for the Magasin Electrique or Lot 8, which would double as the base for the atelier's activities. The refurbishment exercise utilised sunflower fibres, salt crystals, algae and waste clay for different building components, which were created through a three-year pilot and experimental project in collaboration with BC architects & studies and Assemble. The emphasis was on sustainability and circular design to rethink how we can build in the future, ‘a building of uncertainties’, as LUMA’s director has described it. Working on such radical materials, there is always a degree of uncertainty that an experiment conducted in a lab may not be able to be scaled up for mass production, as Waal underscores. “It’s a bit like cooking”, she notes of the experimentation and uncertainty involved in utilising resources that have their own life.

Before having worked with LUMA, Waal’s practice involved several projects that foregrounded the more-than-human, concentrating on water, landscape, food, crafts, biomaterials and animals, in different geographies and how these work in assemblages of human-nature. For instance, last year, Waal oversaw a project at Ornamenta in Germany. For the contemporary art and design programme with a focus on creating linkages between landscapes, communities and industrial practices, Waal presented Water Hadde Dudde Da (What Do You Have There?), creating an alcohol-free drink made from local waters, German hops and Japanese knotweed to shed light on challenges within the beer and beverage industry and newly arrived species in and around the region. Along with her current research, a new book, Water Works published by Valiz offers further insights into working with these shifting terrains. The goal has always been to work out ways to create wider acceptance for the sustainable design products created through these residencies and the lifestyles these espouse.

The project closest to her heart seems to be the rejuvenation of wetland ecosystems, evident through the work she has initiated through cultural organisation Arcadia in the Frisian peat meadows with Veenweide Atelier and previous fieldwork in Mediterranean wetlands with LUMA, integrating southern European, north African and West Asian remote wetland communities. Currently, an inaugural exhibition of projects stemming from the Veenweide Atelier, for which she is the founder and artistic director, is on view at the Fries Museum. Veenweide Atelier: Design for a Sunken Marsh brings together the work of different designers invited by Waal to reconsider how we can use the materials of the peat meadow, so as not to cause strain on depleting resources or marred landscapes. “The peat meadow is a region in crisis,” Waal notes. “But that’s also where the potential lies. If everything still works perfectly, there’s little need for change. Crisis areas are the best places for innovation.”

Open to the public from May 24 - October 26, 2025, the showcase includes scalable furniture designs created with wetland plants like cattail by industrial designer Friso Wiersma; a circular pop-up infrastructure to cultivate pigment-producing bacteria found in healthy soil and manure used to dye textiles developed by London-based Faber Futures; Cropscapes, a mapping project by designers Lenora Ditzler and Janna Bystrykh that focuses on grasslands, comparing the activities of three farmers; and a multidisciplinary and interspecies project by Designer Tjeerd Veenhoven showcasing work on what he calls 'boundary objects' or alternative building material experiments that make use of agricultural waste and fungi. Another pivotal project initiated by nature conservation organisation It Fryske Gea and the Veenweide atelier in the peat meadows is the restoration of a vacant farmhouse. Along with Dutch architecture studio, OOZE Architects, the farmers, and communities in the area, various proposals speculate on how to move towards a community-oriented vision of living, working and caring for the peatland; spotlighting bio-based and regenerative building methods.

While each intervention addresses the fragility of the landscape, susceptible to drying and rising sea levels caused by the climate crisis; they also underscore nature’s resilience. Collaborative models of intervention, such as Waal’s intertwined approach to practice, demonstrate the vitality of care as a practice towards the natural environment through architecture and design. They make room for new ways of generating income: capturing carbon, cultivating wetland crops, developing a sustainable wetland crop chain and revaluing the landscape’s beauty, while holding space for alternative ways of being. As Waal reiterates in her conversation with STIR, true innovation takes place through doing—by staying with the trouble and getting dirty. Ultimately, stewardship towards the natural world can only be achieved through a process of acknowledgement towards the earthly.

Tap on the cover image to watch our full interview with Henriette Waal.