Marius Sidaravicius, age 24, graduated from the Bartlett, UCL, in 2024 with a degree in architecture and interdisciplinary studies, and has spent the time since building Resource 12, a venture he co-founded with Harang Seo and Hannah Simon to tackle a problem he first noticed as a student: architecture, as a profession and as an education, generates enormous waste while teaching almost nothing about how to deal with it.
During a university summer between his second and third year, Marius and his collaborators noticed how much usable material was discarded after model-making projects and annual exhibitions, and built a small circular material hub at their school to capture and redistribute it, naming it Founders Keepers. The project, still running today, led them to a bigger question: if this worked at their school, could it expand? That curiosity connected them to the Architects Climate Action Network and its student arm, StuCan, and took their workshops to universities across the UK.
The thread running through all of Marius’s work is the UN Sustainable Development Goal that gives Resource 12 its name: responsible consumption. For him, that goes beyond materials reuse; it extends to who gets to participate in shaping shared spaces. The Scarlett Westbrook Living Lab Garden, Resource 12’s most visible project, transformed a fenced-off, disused site at the University of London into an open, community-built space, using translucent fencing so passersby could watch the build unfold and be drawn in. What started as a design exercise became, in his words, “a little zoo” a public performance of placemaking that built genuine community attachment, with participants returning week after week and bringing friends and family to see what they had helped create.
Marius is candid that neither he nor Harang are biodiversity experts; they worked closely with ecologists Susanna Grant and John Little to get that part right. What he brings instead is a sharp instinct for opening up process, exposing how spaces get made, and inviting people who have never been asked before to help make them.

Harang Seo is a 24-year-old architecture graduate with a different approach to the more common conservation or activism narratives: one rooted in curiosity, material experimentation, and a refusal to accept that buildings and the natural world must exist as separate concerns.
He studied architecture and interdisciplinary studies at the Bartlett, UCL, in a deliberately unconventional bachelor’s course that encouraged students to draw from literature, film, and anthropology rather than following a strictly technical path toward professional accreditation.
Harang describes architectural education as too often abstract; drawings and renderings disconnected from how buildings actually interact with nature, how sunlight moves across a site, or how materials behave once they are built rather than simply specified. He believes the most powerful learning happens hands-on: manipulating materials directly, testing traditional building techniques, and discovering through trial what a finished space actually demands. That conviction is what drew him toward circularity and reuse as a practical, constraint-driven design language built from what is already available, including waste.
Alongside Marius Sidaravicius and Hannah Simon, Harang co-founded Resource 12, a venture exploring circular economy practices within architecture and design education. Their most visible project, the Scarlett Westbrook Living Lab Garden at the University of London, is built almost entirely from waste materials and now functions as a working demonstration of what circular design can look like in practice; a space where the structure itself teaches the values behind it