A clickbait title, am I right? However, before you zip past this article, we wanted to highlight an up-and-coming building material that can surprise many people, even myself, which is mycelium, a specific portion of a mushroom! Who knew a great pizza topping like mushrooms could be utilized as a building material but with advancing technologies and strive for sustainable architecture – the future is here now! Let’s first define Mycelium;
Mycelium is the vegetative part of a fungus or fungus-like bacterial colony, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like hyphae. These thread-like fibers of fungus are 100% organic, compostable, and biodegradable. When it is dried, it becomes incredibly durable and resistant to water, mold, and fire.
Itās hard to say when, exactly, designers realized fungiās true potential. However, Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre founded Ecovative, a New York-based biotech company, best known for its mycelium development, in 2007. They grow the mycelium in plastic molds in varying arrangements! From that point, Mycelium has been used in various forms on a smaller scale, such as packaging. Companies such as IKEA and Dell use it as an alternative to polystyrene, which takes decades to break down naturally and poses great difficulty when recycling it! So what makes this material a future hot-commodity for designers?
Biodegradable + Regenerative Architecture
There are countless benefits to using mycelium as a building material, but the most appealing characteristic is its ability to be biodegradable and regenerative. Though these two can be characterized as two qualities, I think it’s beneficial to view them as one.
A great example I’ve read is using mycelium for disaster relief homes that could be transported, easy to set up and leave to be composted at the end. A real-life scenario is looking at the devastating impact of hurricane Ida in Louisiana, an area prone to natural disasters, which could utilize mycelium-based shelters to mitigate economic strain for the state. Mycelium relief shelters can be translated to any worldwide event too!
By using mycelium, there will be a huge reduction on the reliance on fossil fuels – the embodied energy required for fabrication – and a massive reduction in the building wastes! Using biodegradable materials, a building could feed into a regenerative ecosystem from its raw materials to a building’s end-of-life cycle. On the other hand, one could question that mycelium-based design could be classified as sustainable design, though certain aspects can; I’d argue that sustainable design mitigates its carbon footprint – even reach net-zero energy waste or create energy for its neighbors – but that doesn’t ensure sustainable architecture can be broken down and “regenerate” the ecosystem where its located. This brings me to my next point below, where mushroom architecture utilized sustainable techniques and becomes regenerative to its community.
The Hy-Fi Project in Queens, New York
In 2014, The Living Embodied Computation Lab, commissioned by Princeton University, created the Hy-Fi in Queens, New York. The project went on to win the 2014 Young Architects Program Competition at MoMA PS1 in New York.
The main building material of this project are bio-bricks composed of corn stalks and mycelium! The gaps of the brickwork will help naturally ventilate the interior space using the stack effect of drawing cool air at the bottom and pushing hot air out the top! This proposition uniquely showcases the possibility of creating net-zero buildings and be regenerative of its site. After the exhibition, the local community took the bricks to use as compost for the surrounding gardens.
Fortifying with Mycelium
In the previous example of bio-bricks, mycelium can be compared to like glue! Not quite like it, but the thread-like fibers, hyphae, grab onto other materials holding it together. Another small-scale application fortifying with mycelium resulted in a material called Myco-board. This composition board can be used like MDF without the hazardous formaldehyde, which can cause respiratory illness if inhaled when sawn. Myco-board opens the door for the application of mycelium to be explored in furniture design with all the benefits!
Although mycelium bricks are developing, it’s a long way from becoming a viable and widely used building material with its compressive strength around 30 psi compared to 4000 psi compressive strength of concrete, which is dramatically less. However, relative to its weight, a mycelium brick is stronger than concrete, with a cubic meter of mycelium brick weighing 43 kg and a cubic meter of concrete weighing 2400 kg – what a difference! Now, mycelium bricks may not have the compressive strength for full-scale architecture, but furniture design is an easy feat!
Living Structure
Yes, you read that right! Living structure. Though I can’t fully substantiate this, European researchers in the fields of computing, biology, and architecture believe mycelium can go a step further by having the walls be alive! Before you jump to conclusions with horror fantasies, researchers proposed that live mycelium combined with nanoparticles and polymers can make mycelium-based electronics. What does that exactly mean? There’s a possibility that the mycelium fibers could be computationally controlled, creating a self-regulating, adaptive, and autonomous growth and repair! This could propose new paths for designers exploring concepts and pushing past biomimicry design into a new genre!
Another living structural characteristic is that, when placing two live, individual mycelium bricks together, the fibers will rapidly spread among them and bond the two bricks together! How exciting and perplexing it could be on the world as they watch a structure grow and meld together! On the other hand, this organic material’s water resistance decreases over time and eventually becomes vulnerable to mold and humidity. Artist Philip Ross, the cofounder of MycoWorks, mentions that the mycelium bricks survived the east coast winter with no coating and without touching the ground for several years, swelling and shrinking depending on the weather but still functional when dried out. However, when in contact with the ground, a mycelium panel may start to decompose in about a period of six weeks[1].
The Circular Garden Project at Milan Design Week
Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA), working in collaboration with the energy company Eni, developed an architectural structure made of mushrooms that was revealed at Milan Design Week. The āCircular Gardenā is a series of arches composed of one kilometer of mycelium, where the spores were injected into an organic material to start the growth process.
This installation was grown from the soil over six weeks which decomposed by the end of the month. CRA took inspiration from famous Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi to produce a feasible structure for the mycelium to be freestanding. Carlo Ratti eloquently said, “As we continue our collective quest for a more responsive ālivingā architecture, we will increasingly blur the boundaries between the worlds of the natural and the artificial. What if tomorrow we might be able to program matter to āgrow a houseā like a plant? Milanās amazing botanical garden, in the center of the city, seemed the ideal place for such an experiment.ā
Little did he know, researchers are already attempting to program mycelium to self-adapt, regulate, and maintain itself in living walls, so it isn’t preposterous for Ratti to make that claim!
Summary
Check out this video by Verge Science to give you a visual of what could be the future! They perfectly summed up all the points I have created about this up-and-coming material!
Although mycelium is still experimental and unsure if it can be produced on an industrial scale, its development indicates a desire within the industry to create and foster a more sustainable and regenerative attitude. Now that you’ve watched the video and read the article, what do you think about mushrooms? Still, thinking it should only belong in the food industry? I want to say we made a pretty convincing article with some research that says otherwise, but let us know in the comments below!
Well, thatās all we have for you today, and if youāve made it this far, you deserve a cookie. I hope you found this article interesting and took something from it! Sharing is caring! We hope to provide you with valuable insights and share them with someone who might find this useful. Make sure to follow our Youtube and Instagram for more content!
Note:
[1} Karimjee, M.Z. (2014). āBiodegradable Architecture, Finite Construction for Endless Futuresā, Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, Ottawa, Ontario, 2014.
Andrew Adamatzky, Phil Ayres, Gianluca Belotti, and Han Wƶsten. Fungal architecture.
āBuilding with Mushrooms.ā Critical Concrete, 29 Mar. 2021, criticalconcrete.com/building-with-mushrooms/.
Geleff, Jennifer. āFood for Thought: What about Mycelium Architecture?ā Architizer.com, 16 Apr. 2021, architizer.com/blog/practice/materials/mycelium-architecture/.
Sexton, Maria. āMycelium Fungi as a Building Material.ā Rise, 22 July 2021, www.buildwithrise.com/stories/mycelium-fungi-as-a-building-material#:~:text=Shop-,Mycelium Fungi as a Building Material,Grow Your Own Kit.
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