For decades materials engineers have been inspired by biology to create improved properties, for example nacre-inspired hierarchical structures to improve toughness, tree-inspired vasculature to deliver fluids that can react and heal an interface, and mussel-inspired strong underwater adhesives utilizing cation-pi interactions. Now, the bioengineering toolset has reached a maturity where we can start to employ biology directly as materials for the built environment – the mission of the Engineered Living Materials Institute at Cornell. In this seminar, I will highlight several recent projects and then focus on our design and validation of a hybrid living coating that can be applied to conventional structural materials for crack detection. I will describe the development of a bacterial spore–polymer composite coating that enables in situ detection of cracks under different loading modes, geometries, and substrate materials. Excitingly, this biohybrid coating approach unlocks potential, beyond crack detection, for crack mitigation by leveraging the biological component.