Place-Based Processing: Industrial Process Architecture for Sumptuous Convivialities Sarah Kantrowitz Abstract Today, technologies of the emerging bioeconomy present one focused opportunity to unwind and transmute industrial operations into sustainable, regenerative work. Relying on standing industrial process design methods, however, may tether this hope to the same consequences and disparities industrialization has already suffered us the last few centuries. Instead, process design methods reconsidered to begin from specificity of place and reverence for relationship may be a helpful balance to methods that begin from abstract process operations or intended product outcomes, alone. This essay posits that drawing architects deeper into the pragmatics of designing and delivering factories, refineries, waste/ energy plants, or other industrial infrastructure might support the above re-tooling of process design methods toward kind, non-modern practice. Process architecture is an established professional capacity for working spatially and relationally on plant design in collaboration with process engineering, though it is often practiced more by former plant operators than by architects. When included, the role of Process Architect can also be technically well-positioned within standing project delivery structures to help identify and implement better designs for the substantial footprint this building type has in ecological relationship, carbon emissions, material and waste flows, worker’s rights, concentration of capital, and patterns of land use and urbanization. To invite more architects to this seat at the table, this essay offers a very basic introduction (for architects) to the roles of process architecture and process engineering in industrial operations today and to how these disciplines might support a deeper sustainability in the near future. With a stronger coalition of architects working in skillful partnership with the vast webs of human and non-human assemblages shaping today’s industrial landscape, perhaps together we may help re-weave some of today’s most barren and extractive industrial practices into thriving, mutually nourishing convivialities. Keywords Bioeconomy Industrial bioprocessing Process engineering Process architecture Regenerative design Degrowth Bathing





S. Kantrowitz (&) Water, Cambridge, MA, USA e-mail: sarah@bathe.stream © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. R. Thomsen et al. (eds.), Design for Rethinking Resources, Sustainable Development Goals Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36554-6_4 33 34 1 S. Kantrowitz Design Need: Let Go of Industrial Emissions Industrialization has been complex. We make a lot of things we don't need, but also a lot of things we do. Organizing together to work a lot something can be joyful for those involved and generous for others relieved of the responsibility, but it can also enclose commons, impose distance, concentrate power, and exploit brutally. Across the world, consumption of energy and goods or proximity to extraction and pollution have never been distributed evenly. Future generations living cooperatively may want physical infrastructures for shared resource and waste work, but perhaps far less or very different infrastructures than those driving climate crisis today. One aspect of industrialization at least is relatively unequivocal: it has become on the whole a wildly unsustainable source of carbon emissions, serving a dwindlingly small population at the increasing precarity of a growing global majority. This is much more than a design problem, but within it, there are ways architects might be in greater service. To invite more architects into the pragmatics of this work, this essay offers an introduction to the roles that process engineering and process architecture play in the physical design of industrial operations today, and to how these disciplines might be practiced differently with more architects involved in the future. Between energy consumption and process reactions, industrial operations today account for roughly 30% of current carbon emission rates. Industrial processes are also the fastest-growing source of emissions, jumping by 203% since 1990, according to data from the World Resources Institute (Ge et al. 2020). To help focus collective attention on addressing this problem, No. 09 of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) states the objective to “Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation”. In 2023, the UIA World Congress of Architects asked how and where architects can better advance the UN SDGs. This essay is one response. Of the eight official targets established within SDG 09, three seem particularly salient to the built form of physical process design. These three targets are stated as follows: Target 9.3: Increase the access of small-scale industrial and other enterprises, in particular in developing countries, to financial services, including affordable credit, and their integration into value chains and markets Target 9.4: By 2030, upgrade infrastructure and retrofit industries to make them sustainable, with increased resource-use efficiency and greater adoption of clean and environmentally sound technologies and industrial processes, with all countries taking action in accordance with their respective capabilities Target 9.5: Enhance scientific research, upgrade the technological capabilities of industrial sectors in all countries, in particular developing countries, including, by 2030, encouraging innovation and substantially increasing the number of research and development workers per 1 million people and public and private research and development spending Given the scale, scope, and diversity of industrialization’s reach, there are many parallel and interconnected pathways to move toward these targets. Today, mainstream political and economic activity around technologies of the emerging bioeconomy present one focused, substantive design opportunity to do more with less, plan for resilience against uncertain conditions, and embrace a regenerative industrial culture after modernity (Tan and Lamers 2021; Heinzle et al. 2007; D’Adamo et al. 2020; Aguilar et al. 2019). Many points in this essay may be applicable to other areas of manufacturing, energy, or waste management infrastructure. For the sake of brevity and to share from personal experience, I will focus here on the design and delivery of bioprocessing facilities. The bioeconomy is a new term for the broad portion of industry based on the processes of presently living biological organisms and ecosystems, like fuel brewed from freshly grown algae to replace petroleum’s long-deceased hydro-carbon sources. Beyond just fuel, the International Energy Agency estimates that petrochemical feedstocks account for roughly Place-Based Processing: Industrial Process Architecture for Sumptuous Convivialities 12% of global crude oil demand (IEA 2018) and are at least partially constituent to 96% of all products manufactured in the US and Europe. As such, reducing the embodied emissions in a product like petroleum-derived synthetic rubber requires reworking not just the fuel source that powered the factory that made the synthetic rubber, but also reworking the process design recipe for making the material itself, including the embodied emissions in every individual piece of equipment at the factory stacked together into the process flow that produces the rubber. Standing physically inertial against change, every operation is a web of interdependent and interlocking, heavily capitalized design decisions, all dripping in petroleum. Bioprocessing might offer pathways to release both petroleum and its associated inputintensive, control-based manufacturing technologies, and instead embrace lively, renewable biogenic carbon sources and biotic, partnershipbased self-assembling production and decomposition processes. The use of biological processes to serve industrial, agricultural, biomedical, energy, waste management and environmental remediation applications is of course nothing new. Evidence of the first use of bioprocessing goes back at least 8,000 years to the practice of making leavened bread. Beginning about 5,000 years ago, medical practitioners in China used moldy soybean curd to treat skin infections, and about 4,500 years ago, Egyptians began malting and fermenting barley into beer (Ladisch 2002). Bioprocessing is also regularly practiced by a wide range of more-than-human beings, such as the leaf-cutter ants that ferment plant matter into fungal biomass to maintain a domestic food source inside their colonies. Over the last few years, a range of new biotechnologies have been coming online and dropping in cost that might help to soften the walls between industrial and living processes. As techniques advance, we may find new old ways to steward evolution in cells and consortia to give rise to more of the metabolic pathways and congenial transformations of matter and energy we desire, sans gadgetry. Bioprocessing also has a history of being an enjoyable activity, suited to 35 serving the social and economic equity also tasked by SDG No. 09. As with traditional fermentation and other large-volume biotechnologies like farming or forestry, the regenerativity and resiliency of bioprocessing may best be leveraged by operations that are adaptive, decentralized, small or medium-sized, slow, and site-specific. When organized accordingly, these operations can be well-suited to management by collectivities across a range of scales, levels of capitalization, irregularity, and mode of cultural integration. Good design requires being part of these socio-political and economic organizing processes in concert with organizing towards physical form (Shapira et al. 2022; Bookchin 1971). Overall, as late enlightenment re-learns how to observe and negotiate with the genetics and population dynamics of microorganisms, funguses, parts of living cells, plants, animals, and microbial or other vital consortia (Bennett 2010), many opportunities open for industry to un-learn the distinction between producing technologies and participating in living systems, and to hold space for passing the shame and grief wound into that complex legacy of alienation. According to a report released by the McKinsey Global Institute, “as much as 60 percent of the physical inputs to the global economy could, in principle, be produced biologically,” (Chui et al. 2020; Adom et al. 2014). A recent report issued by the United States Congressional Research Service to shape federal investment in the emerging bioeconomy offers that, “some experts estimate the direct economic impact of bio-based products, services, and processes at up to $4 trillion per year globally over the next 10 years” (Gallo 2022). While dreams of self-repairing personal electronics grown from waste sludge still flicker out on the horizon, other novel bioprocesses are ready to go. Basic science has demonstrated viability in both broad applications like bioplastics and biofuels as well as in niches like enzymes that improve efficiency in pulp and paper bleaching, soil microbes that reduce fertilizer use and sink greater atmospheric carbon loads, polyurethane foams made from algae oil 36 S. Kantrowitz waste streams in omega-3 fatty acid production, and sustainable fish meal culled from methane that was previously being vented to the atmosphere (Hodgson et al. 2022). 2 Design Need: Professional Roles and Competencies We have so much knowledge in sustainable practices, but dismantling unsustainable practices remains a challenge. It is often speculated that this is due more to siloed hoarding of wealth and power than to any limits in our socio-technical design capabilities, but I am enough of a materialist to feel that these things go together. Billions of dollars and as many research hours have been funneled toward prototyping and proving scientific possibility across many verticals at benchtop volume, but the development of reliable processes to grow complex, dynamic, and highly variable living systems into appropriately sized commercial operations is still its own challenge. To quote Schmidt Futures on the gap between research and practice in this space, “an analogy would be turning a home-based, onecarboy beer fermenter into a [network of] fullfledged brewer[ies] capable of producing enough beer to stock every liquor store, bar, and restaurant,” (Hodgson et al. 2022). Or to use a fun historical example, it was 1928 when Alexander Fleming made the incidental observation that colonies of Penicillium notatum could inhibit the growth of Staphylococcus culture in a petri dish, but more than a decade passed before it was worked out how to produce the volume of penicillin needed for commercial distribution. Finally in 1941, Mary Hunt devised a method working at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to batch growth of pencillin on moldy cantaloupes set bobbing in submergedculture tanks of corn steep liquor, a byproduct of the cornstarch industry whose sugars were found to accelerate the targeted mold growth (Shuler and Kargi 1991), and that is all before even beginning to mobilize the resources to crystallize this process into a manufactory. On Page 02 of a recent report to US President Joe Biden entitled “Biomanufacturing to Advance the Bioeconomy”, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (2022) state that they have “identified three key gaps that are slowing the country’s progress and must be addressed if we are to realize this enormous potential…: insufficient manufacturing capacity, regulatory uncertainty, and an outdated national strategy”. Likewise, the 2022 Schmidt Futures Report “The U.S. Bioeconomy: Charting a Course for a Resilient and Competitive Future” (Hodgson et al. 2022) offers “building a national infrastructure for bioproduction scale-up capacity” as number two of its four core investment recommendations. Given the scale, complexity, and uncertainty of the design and construction task ahead in delivering retrofit or new bio-industrial infrastructure, it is beyond the scope of this paper to make specific facility design recommendations. More critically, it is the concern of this paper to make recommendations about the type of design roles and competencies that can be developed in order to have design professionals able to support specification of those recommendations insitu as this need matures. As things currently stand, architects are not on the list. Taking the above mentioned 2022 Schmidt Futures Report as a litmus test of current influential views in industry, government, and academic research, it is generally perceived that “a further constraint on developing bioproduction capabilities… is that there is a severe shortage of bioprocess engineering talent… one that raises the need for education in bioprocess engineering at all levels, from community college to graduate school (as well as) process development research and training programs”. Besides bioprocess engineers, the other professionals presented in the report as necessary to design, build, and run bioproduction processes are “automation engineers, manufacturing science and technology staff, downstream processing staff, and commissioning, qualification, and validation engineers”. While it may feel obvious to many that process engineering is the design competency in Place-Based Processing: Industrial Process Architecture for Sumptuous Convivialities greatest demand to support bioprocess scaling and implementation, it is my sense that many of process engineering’s core design precepts have also gotten us into this climate pickle in the first place. A chemical engineer either currently occupies or has previously occupied the CEO position for 3M, DuPont, Union Carbide, Texaco, General Electric, Dow Chemical, and Exxon. To quote the great Audre Lorde, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Lorde 1981). Based on my light preliminary experience as an (unlicensed) architect working with process engineers to plan roughly 600,000 SF of commercial processing operations across the sectors of medical biologics, precision fermentation, and relationship-based food systems, it seems that current dominant approaches in process development may risk recapitulating in biological process many of the same downsides to currently dominant petro-chemical activity. In their article “Building a Bottom-Up Bioeconomy”, Shapira et al. (2022) frame this challenge aptly: “rather than trying to industrialize biology, the real task is biologizing industry.” Where this work touches the physical design of industrial processes at scale, I am humbly of the view that architecture might offer a set of design tools quite useful in helping ‘biologize industry’. I am also of the view that architects can contribute to this work more effectively by entering a standing role (like process architect) on project delivery teams and by working in close partnership with process engineering. 3 Design Methods: Process Engineering Process engineering is the work of designing, controlling, and operating process and instrumentation lines to transmute raw matter into desired material at industrial scale. While process engineers can work with all manner of matter in all manner of industries from mining to pharmaceutical production to wastewater treatment, a consistent material theme is that process engineers tend to deal with the manipulation of 37 batched or continuous flows of substance (e.g., aluminum alloy, latex, cheese powder, etc.), as opposed to the manufacturing engineers who build assembly lines for discrete products (e.g., cars, dental dams, boxed mac & cheese, etc.) (Brodkey and Hershey 1987). As discussed above, this essay takes interest in modes of bioprocessing that are themselves biological, using life to manage life (Lorimer 2020) and allowing complexity to self-assemble, but to get there, we are reviewing the dominant shape of industry tools as they stand today and the history on which they have been built. Process engineering emerged as a branch of chemical engineering (Walker et al. 1937; Underwood 1965). Even if the source material being handled by a given process is biological, current modes of engagement are often largely chemical and mechanical: running mass balances and material flows through equipment like plastic tanks, rigid metal piping, pumps, valves, disposable filters, centrifuges, and automation controls to monitor and adjust properties like phase, density, viscosity, particle-size distribution, pressure, or temperature in order to optimize for throughput rate, process yield, and product purity. It is generally agreed upon that the first consultant to begin calling himself a chemical engineer was George Davis, working in Britain in the late nineteenth century just as the manufacture of a handful of chemicals were growing to industrial proportions. Davis had studied chemistry and begun his career at Bealey’s Bleach Works in Manchester, followed by roles at several other chemical firms, culminating in his appointment to the Alkali Inspectorate in 1881 (Cohen 1996). His responsibility was to inspect Leblanc alkali works of the Midland regions to enforce the Alkali Act of 1863. Industrialization of the (then) new Leblanc process had enabled production of sodium carbonate (soda ash) from salt, coal, and limestone as demand from the growing soap, glass, and textile industries outpaced harvests of naturallyoccurring soda from kelp and barilla. This process had also begun spewing dangerous quantities of gaseous hydrochloric acid into the air. One of the first pollution control laws ever passed, the 38 Alkali Act sought to curb this unregulated discharge from the burgeoning soda industry. As the potency of the Leblanc process culled together what had been a stew of craft operations working on a theoretical basis akin to witchcraft (Federici 2004; Stanley 1995) and transfigured them into the modern chemical industry, Davis’ job as an Alkali Inspector also gave him a frontrow seat to scrutinize and compare each different factory’s attempt at rationalizing their operations. Perhaps even more so, he became acutely concerned with the rapidly growing industry’s failures of rationalization. Frustrated by the abundance of wasteful, polluting, and poorly managed plants with little understanding of their own operations, Davis wrote a letter to the editor of the Chemical News in June 1880 proposing the creation of a Society of Chemical Engineering to crystallize this new class of professional expertise: “Many processes can be carried on very successfully by chemists in the laboratory, but few are able to make chemical processes go on the large scale, and simply because they have a lack of physical and mechanical knowledge combined with their chemistry… Chemists with a thorough knowledge of physics combined with a fair knowledge of mechanics…Such men are not very plenty we know, but they would, by forming such a society, help to diffuse that knowledge through the next generation, if not in the present.” (Flavell-While 2012). While his petition was at the time unsuccessful (it would take another 40 years for the first professional society of chemical engineers to be founded in 1922), he continued working to spread the understanding that addressing the problems of a given chemical plant could be abstracted into general principals, systemized, and compared to other plants or even to other process types, as problems of engineering. While other industrial chemistry books written at the time were siloed to a given type of chemical process like brewing or acid production, in 1887, Davis gave a series of 12 lectures at the Manchester School of Technology presenting an approach that instead broke complex, historically entangled processes down into a relatively small number of universal subset operations, each of S. Kantrowitz which could then be independently refined and applied back to any other industrial chemical process (Davis 1901). This foundational concept of the newborn discipline of Chemical Engineering was further developed and given a name by Arthur D Little around 1915, while he was helping shape the chemical engineering curriculum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Little called it the Unit Operation. A 1922 report he chaired for the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ Committee on Education lays out the framework clearly: Chemical engineering as a science, as distinguished from the aggregate number of subjects comprised in courses of that name, is not a composite of chemistry and mechanical and civil engineering, but a science of itself, the basis of which is those unit operations which in their proper sequence and coordination constitute a chemical process as conducted on the industrial scale. These operations, as grinding, extracting, roasting, crystallizing, distilling, air-drying, separating, and so on, are not the subject matter of chemistry as such nor of mechanical engineering. Their treatment in the quantitative way with proper exposition of the laws controlling them and of the materials and equipment concerned in them is the province of chemical engineering. It is this selective emphasis on the unit operations themselves in their quantitative aspects that differentiates the chemical engineer from industrial chemistry, which is concerned primarily with general processes and products (Van Antwerpen 1980) As with all modernist, enlightenment epistemologies, the abstraction and atomization of the Unit Operation is both its profound potency and its liability. The inevitable cost of systematic isolation and operable control is alienation from felt sense of relational meaning or purpose and falling deaf to signals and feedback loops, checks and balances in the lost intimacy of mutual knowing between a process and its role in an environment. This abstraction of processes away from place and path-dependent interrelationships has granted process engineering an impressive capacity to re-plumb the physical transformation processes of industrialization hard and fast past any sentimentality in millennia of accrued metabolic pathways, interwoven ecological assemblages, or socio-environmental Place-Based Processing: Industrial Process Architecture for Sumptuous Convivialities rhythms, but we have also done just that (Tsing 2021; Haraway 2016). Now that we find ourselves living in the abiotic tailing ponds of petrochemical industrialization’s fever dream, will the disassociated abstraction of unit operations find the wholism to build more sustainable, resilient, and equitable shared processing infrastructures for basic food, fuels, materials and medicines, while generally also building less? Sustainability-minded engineers have offered that the methods of resource accounting in a mass and energy balance can just scale from plant to planet, re-situating a given process design within its finite or circular context (Woinaroschy 2016; Zhang et al. 2017). In this view, process engineering, “can/must define its subject area as the whole socio-metabolic system and its target as sustainability transition. Through philosophical and sociological arguments, concepts of human existence, society and social system, production/consumption, exchange and economy, politics and policies, information, science and technology are clarified with a hope that these issues can be incorporated into chemical engineering principles in the future” (Horio 2019). Is this approach holistic or subjugating in its reach for totality? Even in the most advanced realms of biological engineering, working in hushed proximity with the most intricate details of living, breathing beings, it is easy for industrial biotechnology to default to the metaphor of casting life as a machine to be controlled: “With biotechnology, we can direct the nanoscale machinery of living cells to produce self-contained factories that perform on a characteristic scale of one micron… The challenge facing bioengineers is to redirect genetic and cellular machinery to make economically important molecules when the cells are placed in controlled environments. Engineers must design, build, and operate hardware and integrated systems that can multiply a cell’s output by a factor of one trillion, as well as recover and purify the products in a cost-effective manner. Bioprocess engineering is the next frontier.” (Ladisch 2004). While this latter view may be a singularly impoverished imagination of the connective, 39 relational expanse of linkage and attunement available through process engineering, it is helpful to read lucidly this historicallyentrenched chemical-mechanical ideology while here in attendance to the forces powerfully reworking the dis- or a-biotic ever on towards the biotic, with or without us. By holding understanding of these path-dependencies neutrally and candidly alongside respect and admiration for the rigor, potency and accomplishments of process engineering, it may be possible to build more richly integral and balanced creative partnerships between engineering and architecture in ecological design of industrial operations (Gibbs 2008). 4 Design Methods: Process Architecture Process architecture today is generally practiced as a supporting or translational role between process engineering and conventional architecture in the delivery of an industrial facility. Despite the name, it is often practiced by people who are not trained in architecture. Like lab planning for R&D environments or medical planning for hospitals, many process architects enter the work through having been users or operators of facilities themselves, intimate with the spaces needed to run operations via first-hand experience. After a process engineer has developed diagrammatic process flows and equipment sizing for an industrial project, today’s process architect can help to spatialize the process and to manage coordination between process requirements and overall facility planning. For example, if the process engineering team has specified an equipment line with clean classification requirements, process architecture might then draw up a set of rooms sized and sequenced to organize adjacencies, separations, clearances and circulation between equipment placement, service connections, material flows, operator and maintenance access, and hazard management. Process architecture can coordinate with the facility MEP engineering team to layer in process utility point-of-use sizing and placement, various 40 destinations for differentiated waste drainage, back-up power requirements, or directional air flow. Coordination with the structural engineering team can layer in accommodation for equipment loads, specialized overhead support requirements, or metrological isolation against vibration. Coordination with the architecture team can then layer in requirements for envelope penetrations, ceiling access, emergency containment curbing, a specific thickness of epoxy floor finish, interlocking of door control hardware for entry/exit airlocks gating clean flow of personnel and materials, or a comfortably sized janitor’s closet. As in all building projects, coordination with construction planning, project financing, regulatory compliance, and permitting can all also feed back iteratively on the design process, incrementally aligning towards a resolved, built whole. Process architecture is by no means a part of every industrial project team. When needed, it can play a critical and central role in developing a facility, but is also generally contracted onto a project long after the most core process design commitments have already been made. Alternatively, there are many ways that the goal of sustainable industry could be well served by developing both a more robust professional design competency for process architecture and by increasing integration of process architecture into a broader scope and earlier stages of bioprocess development. For example, I think this new process architecture would be able to take the lead on much needed work in better integrating worker rights and quality of life into the core of operations planning, de-intensifying process design to decarbonize and welcome more ecological complexity and resiliency into material/energy flows, or working through affordably scaled-down mid-size facility standards that better enable decentralized operations, local or cooperative ownership, degrowth, onshoring and regional cultural integration. To simplify, this set of design priorities for process architecture might all fall together under the mantle of a place-based or a relationship-based approach to process design. In their essence, sustainability and place might both be about S. Kantrowitz dense ecologies of relationship that work well together. As things hum and life invites more life, we dip from the sustainable to the regenerative to the sumptuously convivial. Three major rock formations run beneath Dallas, Texas. In a rainstorm, the expansive clay soils of the Eagle Ford shale can swell enough to move the foundation of a building up to one inch. Somewhere on the northeastern fringes of the city, the proposed design for a 300,000 SF cleanroom blood protein extraction plant recoils at the possibility of this subtle external perturbation. The reams of hygienic stainless steel process piping with rigid validated-weld connections are only able to tolerate one-quarter inch of movement in their run from the 5,000L buffer tanks up overhead to the building’s steel structure and over and down to the column chromatography skids. The evolving design of the plant reacts, injecting a few million dollars of rebar and labor into hardening its concrete foundation slab against the surrounding earth. Executing this work sucks in more global byproducts of the petrochemical industry and belches more carbon emissions out into the atmosphere, but succeeds in the goal of safeguarding further isolation, fending off the unwelcome variability of the plant’s surroundings, and exerting further control over the conditions of its interior. A glimpse of a brilliantly white, smooth, and sterile chamber glistens out of view as the doors of three nested airlocks snap shut (Fig. 1). Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean and deep within the bowels of the Alps, thousands of open-format bioreactors come alive to the daily moisture-wick of porous stone walls, the seasonal cycle of humidifying glacial melt, ventilating winds gifted by fissures, and the vast thermal mass holding cavernous cells cool but not frozen. Erosion from subterranean rivers of glacial melt collapse adjacent rock formations and grant the cheese aging cave new real estate, spaces tuned to thrive on the geological upheaval of the facility’s broader host environment and eager to be populated with biofilms of companion microflora. As millions of kilos of cheese blossom in these mountain caves, one almost Place-Based Processing: Industrial Process Architecture for Sumptuous Convivialities 41 Fig. 1 Inside an oral solid dosage and injectable pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in Nagpur, India. It looks very clean. © Kunal Kampani gets the idea that this lively family of fermented foods co-evolved with or even emerged from the microbially- and hydro-/geologically-entangled process architectures used to manufacture them (Fig. 2). These two tales of bioprocess architecture present a very different relationship to place. In the first scenario, process design performance is premised on maximizing control of interior conditions by maximizing isolation from the surrounding environment. In the second scenario, the performance of this bioprocessing facility is premised on interdependence with and making use of existing environmental conditions, cultivating processes that are able to adapt fluidly to and benefit from the variability in these conditions, precisely because of their intimacy with and embodied knowledge of their place. While helping design the blood fractionation plant in the first scenario as a member of the cGMP process architecture team at a large corporate architecture firm, I experienced the role of process architecture more or less as it stands in the industry today. The process engineering firm on the project had been brought on by the client roughly five years prior to the beginning of our architectural engagement. In that time, the process engineers had helped take the client’s benchtop volume discoveries from the laboratory (roughly 0–50 L per batch), test scaling them through pilot volumes (roughly 50–500 L per batch), and prepare plans for the full commercial volume demo plant my team was then brought on to help deliver (10,500L per batch or roughly 1,500,000 L per year). Given the complexity of current bioprocessing facilities, path dependencies bake so many practice ideologies and embodied or operating emissions sources into thousands of interlocking decisions on project financing, building scale and siting, material supply chains, building HVAC and other environmental controls, building and equipment construction materials, maintenance, and waste. Under typical project delivery workflows, the energy demands and dependencies of many bioprocessing operations can also be fixed in place by early-stage process development decisions without the option to revise as full scaling impacts or opportunities become legible to all parties. By the time the process architecture team was involved in the above project, the vast majority of these decisions were already locked in. 42 S. Kantrowitz Fig. 2 The Cooperativa Produttori Latte e Fontina near Aosta, Italy receives fresh cheese weekly from its 200 or so member cheese makers and then manages the 2– 3 month aging process of the wheels in a cave complex with a capacity for roughly 150,000 wheels at a time. Dug out into the rock, the cavernous spaces of the aging cave were originally cleared as the access tunnel to a former copper mine and then later as military storage depots during World War II. The warehouses passively maintain a humidity of >90% and a temperature of around 10 ° C year-round, further stabilized by cool streams of glacial melt plumbed through open trenches at ground level along the perimeters of all the aging chambers. When I asked the operators how they handle any regulatory concerns over the mold or algae found growing everywhere on their cave walls, they shrugged and responded that the mold was there when they arrived. I took this photo visiting in July 2019 Where process engineering might be a method of building industrial process design down from the abstract non-location of unit operations and laboratory environments, process architecture might become the design method of growing process design up from the specificity of place, working with communities back from affordances culled out of the particular ecological assemblages, flows, and socio-cultural practices of a unique geographic location engaged in the development of a given piece of industrial process infrastructure. Together these two approaches might meet in the middle and iterate to align on a shared vision for a given facility and its associated material/energy cascades, circles, or industrial symbionts (Grann 1997; Chertow 2008; Bezama 2016). Following the case of the cheese aging caves, and with humility to be lead and not reinvent the waterwheel, the Nashtifan windmills, or millennia of indigenous land stewardship practices (Whitewashed Hope 2022; Watson 2021), bioprocessing infrastructure can begin by feeling a place closely and learning what emerges there. After conducting field research to survey a dozen or so northern Italian cheese aging caves for found process design strategies in modulating environmental temperature, humidity, ventilation, and microbial growth, my feeling is that aged cheese did indeed emerge from the affordances of its processing environment. The design of the product follows from the conditions of Place-Based Processing: Industrial Process Architecture for Sumptuous Convivialities the facility rather than the the facility following from the product. As the cheese ages in the cave, losing water at a controlled rate to the moisture capacitance of porous lithic walls abundant in the processing environment, the solidifying biotic mass becomes the vessel of its own batched unit. The cheese rind is a self-assembling bioreactor whose functionality arises in concert between its living contents, the conditions of its processing environment, and gentle periodic human intervention (typical practices include hand pats, brushing, or brining at different time intervals depending on the type of cheese). When it is no longer needed, the rind bioreactor decomposes or becomes its own snack. 5 Next Steps: Growing Design Community in Bioprocess Infrastructure In my experience, many builders, operators, and engineers are open to more holistic collaboration in the development of ambitiously sustainable or regenerative industrial projects. Equally, to move from idea to reality in any large, organizationally complex project, it is necessary for a team to all be able to speak the same language, to have clear methodologies, and to build trust. It can sometimes feel like a common reprise from architects that we ought to be consulted on all manner of things on which we are currently not consulted. This is not my proposal. I propose that architects might enter a (more or less) standing industry role by gaining the shared subject matter expertise and understanding of existing project delivery structures needed to add legible value to this type of project, and from there, within client relationships and project teams, weave in expanded design considerations and steward design scope and phasing strategies into a more balanced and reciprocal collaboration with other disciplines. Industrial operations often appear heavily technical today but they are not impossibly complex systems to learn about at the foundational level needed to collaborate. 43 Developing this more holistic professional role for sustainable process architecture requires building a lot of relationships. Developing this role requires listening, relearning, and growing new understandings of place-based technical expertise in how to participate generatively in biological processes, and the decolonial complement of this work in unlearning current paradigms of domination in industrial operations. On balance, architects are generally already well enough trained in many of the skills needed for a place-based approach to process architecture: reading and leveraging siting, softness, sensitivity to materials, doing more with less, space and flow planning, core principals of passive design, mediating between technical and somatic valences, trusting intuition, feeling, and spotting and cultivating nested socioecological relationships. It seems that young architects today also have a growing appetite to plug into the substantive physical design challenges of our time with both social sensitivity and technical competency. In this regard, I believe the disciplinary partnership proposed in this essay would both support architects in bringing value to process design and would support process design in bringing value to architects. This essay is just preliminary work, and surely in need of further revision, exposition, and alignment with other like efforts. If this framing of the potential to grow process architecture as a place- and relationship-based bioprocess design competency strikes a chord, it may be helpful to next codify this proposal against more systematic case studies or to more thoroughly identify gaps in literature or training resources. For myself, I have fallen into what little I know about process design largely through experience so for now I have presented primarily first-person impressions and speculations, accordingly. If these opportunities resonate with you, I hope we can work together to cull out more practices in bioprocessing that are themselves biological and life affirming (Lorde 1984). By partnering more deeply and more skillfully with each other and with the more-than-human world, 44 perhaps together we may more fully bear witness to the wounds of the anthropocene and help reweave some of today’s most barren and extractive industrial practices into thriving, mutuallynourishing, and sumptuous convivialities Acknowledgments I am immensely grateful to the many colleagues, mentors, friends, and lovers who have shared their work in industrial infrastructure, biorefining, waste management, fermentation, hologenomics, process design over the biorelational continuum, and other modes of hydrofeminist practice. Thank you. References Adom F, Dunn JB, Han J, Sather N (2014) Life-cycle fossil energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of bioderived chemicals and their conventional counterparts. Environ Sci Technol 48:14624–14631 Aguilar A, Twardowski T, Wohlgemuth R (2019) Bioeconomy for sustainable development. Biotechnol J 14:1800638 Bennett J (2010) Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Duke University Press, Durham NC Bezama A (2016) Let us discuss how cascading can help implement the circular economy and the bio-economy strategies. Waste Manag Res 34:593–594 Bookchin M (1971) Post-scarcity anarchism. Ramparts Press, Menlo Park Brodkey RS, Hershey HC (1987) Transport phenomena: a unified approach. Mc Graw-Hill, New York Chertow M (2008) ‘Uncovering’ industrial symbiosis. J Ind Ecol 11(1):11–30 Chui M, Evers M, and Manyika J et al (2020) The bio revolution: innovations transforming economies, societies, and our lives. McKinsey Global Institute, p vi Cohen C (1996) The early history of chemical engineering: a reassessment. Br J History Sci 29(2):171–194 D’Adamo I, Falcone PM, and Morone P (2020) A new socio-economic indicator to measure the performance of bioeconomy sectors in Europe. Ecol Econ 176 Davis G (1901) A handbook of chemical engineering. Davis Brothers, Manchester Federici S (2004) Caliban and the witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia, New York Flavell-While C (2012) George E Davis–Meet the Daddy. The Chemical Engineer. https://www. thechemicalengineer.com/features/cewctw-george-edavis-meet-the-daddy/. Accessed 02 Oct 2022 Gallo M (2022) The bioeconomy: a primer (Version 03). Congressional Research Service, Washington DC. https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R46881.pdf Ge M, Friedrich J, Vigna L (2020) 4 Charts explain greenhouse gas emissions by countries and sectors. S. Kantrowitz World Resources Institute. https://www.wri.org/ insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas-emissionscountries-and-sectors Accessed 04 Oct 2022 Gibbs D (2008) Industrial symbiosis and eco-industrial development: an introduction. Geogr Compass 2 (4):1138–1154 Grann H (1997) The industrial symbiosis at Kalundborg, Denmark. In: DJ Richards (ed) The industrial green game. National Academy Press, Washington Haraway DJ (2016) Staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham NC Heinzle E, Biwer A, Cooney C (2007) Development of sustainable bioprocesses: modeling and assessment. Wiley, Hoboken NJ Hodgson A, Alper J, Maxon ME (2022) The U.S. bioeconomy: charting a course for a resilient and competitive future. Schmidt Futures, New York Horio M (2019) On the historical role of chemical engineers in sustainability transition. Malays J Chem Eng Technol 2:41–56 International Energy Agency (2018) The future of petrochemicals. IEA, Paris. https://www.iea.org/ reports/the-future-of-petrochemicals. Accessed 23 Dec 2022 Ladisch M (2002) Bioprocess Engineering (Biotechnology), pp. 434–459 in Vol. 1 of Scientific Encyclopedia, 9th ed. Van Nostrand, New York Ladisch M (2004) The role of bioprocess engineering in biotechnology. Bridge Natl Acad Eng 34(3) Lorde A (1981) The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. In: Moraga C, Anzaldua G (ed) This bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color. Persephone Press, Watertown MA, p 98 Lorde A (1984) The uses of the erotic: the erotic as power. In: Sister outsider: essays and speeches. Crossing Press, Trumansburg, NY Lorimer J (2020) The probiotic planet: using life to manage life. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (2022) Report to the president: biomanufacturing to advance the bioeconomy. Executive Office of the President. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/ uploads/2022/12/PCAST_Biomanufacturing-Report_ Dec2022.pdf. Accessed 06 Jan 2023 Shapira P, Matthews N, Cizauskas C, Aurand E, Friedman D et al (2022) Building a bottom-up bioeconomy. Issues Sci Technol 38(3). https://issues.org/buildingbioeconomy-engineering-biology-shapira/. Accessed 14 July 2022 Shuler M L and Kargi K (1991) Bioprocess engineering: basic concepts. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ Stanley A (1995) Mothers and Daughters of Invention, Notes for a revised history of technology. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ Tan ECD, Lamers P (2021) Circular bioeconomy concepts—A perspective. Front Sustain 2:701509 Place-Based Processing: Industrial Process Architecture for Sumptuous Convivialities Tsing A (2021) The Mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ Underwood AJV (1965) Chemical engineering—Reflections and recollections. Trans Inst Chem Eng 43 Van Antwerpen FJ (1980) Origins of chemical engineering, In: Furter W (ed) Advances in chemistry. American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, p 190 Walker WH, Lewis WK, McAdams WH, Gilliland ER (1937) Principles of chemical engineering. McGrawHill, New York Watson J (2021) A new mythology of technology: interview with Julia Watson. Next Nat Mag. https:// 45 nextnature.net/magazine/visual/2021/a-newmythology-of-technology. Accessed 24 Aug 2022 Whitewashed Hope: A message from 10+ Indigenous leaders and organizations regenerative agriculture & permaculture offer narrow solutions to the climate crisis https://docs.google.com/document/d/1er9ixhlZ WmwNgywzKPNPuGVfrM5KjeRBdVMiIsjtLUM/ edit. Accessed 08 Aug 2022 Woinaroschy A (2016) A paradigm-based evolution of chemical engineering. Chin J Chem Eng 24(5):553– 555 Zhang YHP, Sun J, Ma Y (2017) Biomanufacturing: history and perspective. J Ind Microbiol Biotechnol 44 (4–5):773–784