Terreform ONE presents the Monarch Sanctuary at the Cooper Hewitt Experience Café:

Theo Dimitrasopoulos & Nicholas Gervasi represented Terreform ONE at the Cooper Hewitt Experience Café on May 22, 2019. The event, held at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, is a recurring public program that brings together designers, researchers, technologists, and members of the public to engage directly with speculative and applied design research at the intersection of technology, ecology, and urban life. Unlike a traditional gallery presentation, the Experience Café format is structured around direct conversation — presenters share ongoing work with visitors in an informal, discussion-based setting intended to make design research accessible to a broad and non-specialist audience.

The work presented at the event was Monarch Sanctuary, a speculative research prototype developed at Terreform ONE's New York studio over several years of collaborative design and ecological research. The project responds to the precipitous decline of the monarch butterfly population — which has fallen by over 80% in the past two decades due to the combined effects of climate change, widespread agricultural pesticide use, and the destruction of milkweed habitat along the species' 3,000-mile migration corridor. Monarch Sanctuary reimagines the commercial building envelope as an active ecological infrastructure: a double-skin façade system designed to provide food, shelter, and rest habitat for migrating monarch butterflies within the dense urban fabric of New York City.

The prototype, developed in collaboration with fabricators Bednark Studio and material supplier BASF, integrates concrete panel elements cast with habitat-specific surface conditions — including moss panels, nectar feeder panels, mud panels, and flower panels — into a structural steel backplate system engineered to carry the combined weight of the panels and their living components. The facade section was developed and exhibited as part of the 2019 Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial: Nature, and the Experience Café presentation provided an opportunity to communicate both the ecological urgency and the technical precision behind the design to a public audience.