The installation, called Hy-Fi, was designed and created by The Living, an architectural design studio in New York. Each of the 10,000 bricks had been made by packing agricultural waste and mycelium, the fungus that makes fungi, into a mold and allowing them to grow into a solid mass.
This mushroom-shaped monument gave architecture researcher Phil Ayres an idea. “It was impressive,” said Ayres, who works at the Center for Information Technology and Architecture in Copenhagen, Denmark. But this project and others like it were using mushrooms as a component in buildings like bricks without necessarily thinking about what new types of buildings we could make with mushrooms. That is why he and three colleagues have started the FUNGAR project, to explore what kinds of new buildings we could build with mushrooms.
Mushrooms can seem like a fancy building material. But there are certainly good reasons to drastically rethink construction. Buildings and construction are responsible for 39% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, and a whopping 21% of those emissions come from steel and concrete manufacturing alone. Construction also uses large amounts of natural resources. Take sand, one of the main ingredients of concrete. You need a special type, with just the right roughness, to make concrete. These days it is a lucrative commodity controlled in some parts of the world by sand mafias and stolen by ships full of islands.
These problems are destined to get worse in the coming decades as the world’s population grows faster and becomes richer. We need many more houses and if you do the math, the amount we need to build is staggering. “It’s like building a Manhattan every month for the next 40 years,” Ayres said, borrowing a line from Bill Gates.
Mushroom bricks
Can mushrooms really help? Absolutely, says mycologist professor Han Wosten from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Fungi are not CO2 consumers like plants are. They need to digest food and produce carbon dioxide, just like animals do. However, the organic waste streams (such as straw or other low-value agricultural waste) that the fungi digest would be degraded to CO2 anyway, either through composting or burning. Additionally, mushroom bricks permanently fix some of that debris inside and thus act as a carbon pool. All of this makes mushroom buildings a climate advantage, and certainly much better than using concrete, steel, and bricks.
The FUNGAR project started at the end of 2019 and so far Professor Wosten has been experimenting with how to make building materials. In Prof. Wosten’s laboratory in Utrecht, the team has been combining mycelium, the “roots” of fungi, with agricultural waste such as straw. They then allow the fungi to grow for about two weeks, until the fungus has colonized the straw. This binds the straw together, producing an off-white foam-like material. They then treat it with heat to kill the organism . They can also process it, for example by coating it or crushing it. “If we press it, we can get a material like pressed wood,” says Professor Wosten. By varying the type of fungi and agricultural waste, growing conditions and post-processing, Professor Wosten says that they are getting all kinds of candidate building materials with different mechanical properties.
“It’s too early to start saying that your house will be made entirely of mushrooms,” Ayres said. But some parts may already be. Mogu, a company based near Milan in Italy, already produces and sells velvet textured wall and floor tiles based on sound dampening mycelium foam. The company’s chief technology officer, Antoni Gandia, is another partner in the FUNGAR project. He said Mogu is also developing mycelium-based insulation material for buildings. Ayres hopes that the FUNGAR project will go beyond the use of mushroom-based products as components in existing building designs. You want to think about what kinds of completely new buildings could be made from mushrooms. The most important thing on your mind is building with live mushrooms.
Live mushroom
This has two main advantages. First, live mushrooms can behave as a self-healing material, simply regrowing if damaged. Second, mycelial networks are capable of processing information. Electrical signals pass through them and change over time in a way almost similar to that of a brain. “We have found that fungal materials respond to tactile stimulation and lighting by changing their patterns of electrical activity,” said Professor Andrew Adamatzky of the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, who coordinates the project with Ayres.
The idea is that perhaps the very structure of a mushroom building can independently sense and respond to its surroundings. For example, it could detect when the mycelium’s CO2 levels are building up and open the windows to release the gas, according to Gandia. Building with live mycelium will be a great challenge. This is because the more it grows, the more substrate material, straw or any residue, decomposes. Since straw gives materials their structural integrity, it is undesirable to allow fungi to grow for too long. However, there may be ways around this. Depriving fungi of water puts them in a dormant state: alive but not growing. So one of Ayres’s ideas is to build walls with two layers of dead mushrooms that enclose a layer of live mushrooms inside. This configuration would exclude the water from the inner layer, keeping the fungus dormant.
One of the few people who has explored mushroom work in construction is Jonathan Dessi Olive from Kansas State University in the US He says that working with live mycelium is a very interesting new idea because it offers the possibility that the building can heal himself. But for him, the real appeal of what he calls “myco-materials” is that they “give us a way to reshape our thinking about the permanence of architecture.”
“What if some, not all, of our buildings were meant to last only a couple of years and then could be recycled into shelter, food, or energy?” .
The next big goal of the FUNGAR project is to build a small, freestanding building. They plan to achieve it within a year and then spend time monitoring it as it ages. It’s crucial, Ayres says, to be able to monitor living structure and see how it changes. It is not yet clear exactly what kinds of structures could end up being made of mushrooms, but they will likely start out small. “I wouldn’t be crossing a bridge made of mushrooms, would I?” Joked Professor Wosten.
You might be wondering what happened to Hy-Fi, that igloo-like structure in New York . The answer points to one of the most beautiful things about mycelium buildings. There is no wrecking ball or slow decay for them. It was disassembled and composted.
Original article
This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine
