Tidal zones are liminal spaces that challenge the ecological, legal and financial thresholds of coastal areas. They appear, disappear, reappear, and constantly change in size and chemistry, while shaped by new human-made seasons of wetland draining and ocean pollution. Following CLIMAVORE, a framework that investigates ways of metabolizing climate breakdown, these littoral spaces are at the core of entanglements between risk and social security, profit margins and contamination struggles, geological processes and weather events; between what is used and what is refused. Thinking with waste seashells and beach-cast seaweeds allows us to expand the possibilities of caring for coastal ecologies, while sensing and monitoring human actions affecting them. As awareness about the environmental footprint of construction and the ‘mitigation’ of its associated toxicities increases, transitions to other forms of building may connect to materials from intertidal origin that can also contribute to addressing the broken food chain. Seaweeds and bivalves have been key in human and nonhuman diets, and used as building substrate across geographies over millennia. Their role in providing nourishment and shelter has supported coastal dwellers to invent unique forms of collective usership through cultivation, harvest, sourcing, processing; and building techniques such as thatching, cladding, insulation, and plastering. Both ingredient and material, they can advance an architecture for the tidal commons.

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