In Milan, to enter this house, you must first take off your shoes. This already shifts things a bit. We are used to thinking of sustainable architecture as a matter of rendering, certifications, conferences, beautiful words strung one on top of the other until they look like furniture. Here, however, we start from a much more down-to-earth gesture: you leave your soles outside, enter a small space, sit down, listen to the buzz of the bees and breathe inside a house of rice.
It is called HEXA, Human Experience Architecture, and it is a microarchitecture developed by Ricehouse together with Apicoltura Urbana in the UpTown park of Cascina Merlata, in Milan. It is open to the public from 18 April to 14 June 2026, with free admission upon reservation; the experience lasts 30 minutes, welcomes up to 6 people per session and takes place from 11am to 5pm, every day except Thursday. The structure combines sustainable architecture and apitherapy, with natural materials derived from waste from the rice production chain and a beehive integrated into the sensory experience.
The rice off the plate
The most concrete part comes from the material. Ricehouse works on a simple question: what happens if rice husks, husks and straw stop being treated as agricultural waste and become construction materials? From there a supply chain was born that uses already available, renewable residues linked to a production area that is very recognizable for Italy, and transforms them into building components. In HEXA this research is compressed into a modular, prefabricated, transportable structure designed to be self-sufficient from an energy point of view thanks to integration with renewable systems.
The materials obtained from the rice supply chain are described for their thermal and acoustic insulation performance, breathability, internal humidity regulation, durability, resistance to mold formation, absence of formaldehyde, recyclability and biocompostability at the end of their life. It is here that the rice house stops being a Fuorisalone curiosity and becomes a piece of serious discussion on living. Because a sustainable house is also measured by what it puts into the air, by how much it heats or cools, by how much noise it retains, by what it leaves behind when its cycle ends.
The context is not marginal. According to the Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction 2024/2025 by UNEP and GlobalABC, the buildings and construction sector consumes 32% of global energy and contributes to 34% of global CO2 emissions. Within these enormous numbers, materials certainly matter: concrete and steel remain central, heavy, difficult to replace on a large scale, but precisely for this reason every alternative supply chain forces us to shift our gaze from just the energy consumption of the building to the material with which the building is put up.
Air, walls, body
In recent years, home has returned to being a less neutral word. After the pandemic we learned to look at rooms with a different suspicion: windows, humidity, mould, air exchange, materials, surfaces, smells. The first Federproprietà-Censis report on Italians and the home indicated that 88.9% of Italians perceive their home as healthy, 86% attribute a positive effect on physical and mental health and 54% declare greater attention to the quality of domestic air after the pandemic.
The US EPA also reminds us how much the issue of indoor air weighs on daily life: people spend on average around 90% of their time indoors and, in some cases, the concentration of indoor pollutants can be 2 to 5 times higher than outside. It is an American fact, of course, but it captures well a very recognizable condition even in Italian cities: we live inside buildings, offices, schools, vehicles, houses that are often poorly sealed or very well insulated and poorly ventilated.
HEXA tries to make this discussion physical. It doesn’t ask you to imagine a technical table, it lets you enter a tiny environment where materials, temperature, humidity, smell and sound are all at the same time. Its strength lies right here: it takes widely used concepts – green building, healthiness, circularity, living well-being – and makes them fit for the body. A small room, a place to sit, a quality of air that is perceived before being told.
The bees in the wall
The other living element are bees. In the project the beehive does not remain a kind symbol to be placed next to the word sustainability. Here it becomes part of the experience: sound, air, living presence, ecosystem. The experience page talks about natural hum, essential oils and propolis as elements designed to promote relaxation, breathing and stress reduction, while for those with allergies to bee stings a careful evaluation is recommended before participation.
Apitherapy, in this case, works above all as a sensorial experience: listening, permanence, slowing down, controlled contact with a hive placed in an urban context. That’s enough already. The project works precisely because it remains within a concrete, sensorial dimension, perceivable in permanence. The continuous buzz of bees inside a microarchitecture made of rice waste has a clear enough power without transforming it into therapeutic promise.
The bees, then, did not appear decoratively. IPBES reminds us that approximately 75% of the world’s food crops and almost 90% of wild flowering plants depend at least in part on animal pollination. In Italy, the 2025 census of the National Bee Registry records 77,449 beekeepers and over 1.7 million hives. Inside the UpTown park, where HEXA is located, there already exists an urban apiary, biodiversity monitoring, flower meadows, birdhouses and a butterfly bed. The rice house arrives in a place that had already begun to treat urban greenery as living infrastructure, not as a backdrop for real estate photos.
A small room, a big question
The real question is simple: what do we use to build the houses in which we spend almost our entire lives? Rice husk, chaff and straw usually end up in the mental waste drawer. Here they become walls, insulation, surfaces, microclimates. A small solution within a huge problem, sure. But precisely for this reason it is interesting: it takes already available material, puts it back into circulation and brings it into a space that can be crossed, not just told.
HEXA does not claim to solve the construction burden alone. It is a prototype, small by definition. However, it makes visible what usually remains hidden behind plaster and technical sheets: the material matters. It matters when it is born, when it enters the house, when we breathe it, when a building reaches the end of its life. Here, for now, you enter barefoot and listen to a hum.
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