Noah: I Tech 4 Wild’s Witness Home

I Tech 4 Wild’s Witness Home: Rewilding Urban Life, One Apartment at a Time

IT4W is designing an experimental urban apartment that reimagines the way we live in dense cities not just by reducing our environmental footprint, but by actively regenerating biodiversity in the very places we call home. The Witness Home is not a futuristic villa or eco-cabin in nature, but rather a fully autonomous city apartment that proves even high-density housing can support life in all its forms.

The project starts from a clear hypothesis: in the coming decades, most people will live in apartments. If we are to address the climate and biodiversity crises seriously, we must rethink not just how we build, but how we coexist with the living world even on the fifth floor of a concrete building.

Every surface in the Witness Home is designed as a micro-habitat: vertical gardens on walls, indoor and balcony permaculture beds, natural water filtration through aquatic plants, solar panels, composting systems, and integrated nesting shelters for insects, birds, and pollinators. The apartment is not only self-sufficient in water, energy, and partial food production, it is also a biodiversity hotspot a rare concept in today’s urban environments.

This initiative is part of IT4W's broader mission to reintroduce ecological functions into everyday urban life. The Witness Home is designed to welcome researchers, architects, social housing stakeholders, and students  offering a tangible model for how biodiversity and urban density can not only coexist, but enrich one another.

A notable real-life example already exists in Île-de-France: in Boulogne-Billancourt, engineer Corentin de Chatelperron and designer Caroline Pultz created a 100% low-tech autonomous apartment. Powered by solar panels, their space features a mist shower to save water, composting toilets, mycelium cultivation, and even edible insect farming. While not directly focused on biodiversity, their radically frugal lifestyle offers a powerful demonstration that autonomy in the city is not only possible, but desirable. The Witness Home builds on that foundation  but places urban rewilding and biodiversity at the very heart of its architecture.

To take this vision even further, we asked ChatGPT how it would imagine a “Witness Home of Noah”  a rural, biodiversity-focused version in the Morvan National Park in Burgundy, France. Here's what the AI suggested:

Designing a fully autonomous house for a family of six on just 1,500 m² in a biodiversity-rich natural park is absolutely achievable  and can serve as a blueprint for eco-living in protected rural zones. Such a home would combine low-tech self-sufficiency with permaculture practices, regenerative food production, and rewilding principles.

This Witness Home of Noah would include:

• A bio-intensive permaculture garden (600 m²) with seasonal rotation, companion planting, raised beds, and no pesticides.
• A food forest zone (500 m²), using existing woodland to grow edible perennials, wild herbs, mushrooms (shiitake, oyster), and fruits.
• A diversified orchard (200 m²) with pollinator-friendly species like apples, cherries, hazelnuts, and berries, planted in “guilds” to attract insects.
• A micro-livestock area (100 m²), mainly for chickens, contributing eggs and natural fertilization.
• Zero-waste systems, including rainwater harvesting, drip irrigation, composting, and vermiculture.
• Shelters for biodiversity, like insect hotels, hedgerows, bat boxes, and no-till soil zones.
• Natural fertilization and pest control using plant-based treatments (e.g., nettle, horsetail) and encouraging native predators like hedgehogs and ladybugs.

Such a project could achieve food autonomy for an entire family, while enhancing the ecological value of the land rather than depleting it. With modest upfront investment, the home becomes a model of resilience  rooted in local ecosystems, circularity, and biodiversity.

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