#mycotecture

[Originally published in Uncube magazine, issue 25. Reposted without permission. More about Rachel Armstrong here.]

Whether in a dense urban environment or on a ship traveling to outer space, humanity is going to need a new type of architecture that can change, learn, and grow with us in the future. Designer Rachel Armstrong believes that we must move from the static to the “soft and living”. In this manifesto for uncube she outlines her vision for the way forward.

Soft living architecture is an ecology for twenty-first century inhabitants to thrive in. While conceptions of nature have evolved since the Industrial Era, architectural materials have until now remained subdued and constrained by hard inert buildings – or machines for living in.

In its approach to its environment, soft living architecture finds kinship with both the human and non-human realms. Yet it does not hanker for an aestheticised or romanticised notion of bucolic nature. Nor does it seek a time before our chemical industrial landscapes, plasticinating seas and choking skies. Rather it regards them as new sites of abundance from which primordial chemical communities can spring into bloom to synthesise living materials and artificial biologies.

Soft living architecture is part of a messy reality where change is sudden, boundaries are real yet transitory, and interfaces are sites for re-bonding, not for further separation. Vibrant architecture is a transformer that does not find an adversary in the machine, but couples horizontally with it and swallows it whole.

Soft living architecture refuses to be restrained behind façades of polished stone or hide its wayward tissues under tidy green lawns. Soft living architecture allies with the natural world and all its exquisite excrements, to emerge through strange new configurations caused by material leakages. Harnessing the potential of “waste” can change our conception of architecture as strictly building-oriented. The emerging aesthetic is not concerned with divisions like “dirty” and “clean” but is alien, unfamiliar – other.

Soft living architecture resists the doom, gloom and skinny corporate corset that is strangling urban communities with the industrial sustainability agenda, which demands material obedience, performance standards and efficiency. It does not sing reassuring Jolly Green sustainability songs - yet it is deeply entangled with the natural world, finding the benefits of the side effects of human existence.

In cities, natural processes can be mimicked to forge an urban metabolism, both ecologically and economically. Bioprocessing activities such as composting, food and energy production generate material value within urban communities through the transformation of resources. Value re-adjustments within urban spaces may change the density of resource distribution networks and therefore influence the way that spaces are inhabited.

There are no models of soft living architecture in the same way that no one organism is a model of another. Soft living architecture is fertile. Its progeny proliferate as rhizomes of networks that transmute industrial deserts into vast metabolic fabrics, blooming with co-evolutionary transformations.

MycoWorks Co-Founder, Philip Ross, is noted for designing and building the first architectural structure made from mycelium!    

Before we meet with Andrew, we wanted to try and refine our design and came across Phil Ross' Mycotecture. 

In 2009, Phil Ross constructed the first fungus architectural house and was presented in Dusseldorf, Germany: http://philross.org/#projects/mycotecture/ And in 2010 TIME magazine wrote about it: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1957474,00.html

The Future is Fungal: Interview with Phil Ross

September 8th, 2012 – Andrea Grover

Phil Ross wants to grow buildings and furniture from mushrooms

Phil Ross (San Francisco) works in the realm of “biotechniques.” He makes sculptural and architectural works from plants and fungi, and videos about live cultures. As the founder and director of CRITTER – a salon centered-around DIY biology events, he has organized events like “Enormous Microscopic Evening” at the Hammer Museum (2010). His multi-decade research into mushrooms has led to his “mycotecture” series, an experiment in using reishi mushrooms as a sustainable construction material (International Patent Pending). Ross is presently designing and prototyping fungal furniture. His work is part of the touring exhibition, “Intimate Science,” which I curated for Carnegie Mellon’s Miller Gallery, and opens next at Real Art Ways in Hartford Connecticut, November 3, 2012.

ANDREA: In addition to being an artist, you’ve worked in restaurants, in roles from dishwasher to chef; and you’ve also served as a hospice caregiver during the AIDS crisis, where you learned about the benefits of “reishi” mushrooms for the immune system. Did these experiences lead you to working with living materials as an artist?

PHIL: Yes, but I’d go back a little bit further. I grew up in New York City, and like a lot of urban people, I felt highly alienated from nature. I wanted to connect, but I didn’t really know how. The experiences you mention kind of unlocked the “how.” Food and mushrooms were the materials that were in my proximity, so they were the entry point. It became apparent to me that you can connect to nature through pretty much anything or any kind of activity that’s close to you.

ANDREA: Where did you work as a chef?

PHIL: One of the places I worked for four or five years was in upstate New York, at this place called the Omega Institute, which is a kind of a new age retreat center. I spent part of the year there, and in San Francisco, and also traveling around the world. It was at Omega that I was introduced to mushroom hunting from some of the other chefs. It’s in the Hudson Valley and there are all these hardwood forests around there, making it a great habitat for mushrooms.

ANDREA: I think it’s interesting how you describe mushroom hunting as “an esoteric skill” that “bridges delicacy and poison.”

PHIL: Yeah. If you learn to motorcycle race, there’s that tension of having to know what you’re doing and remain in control. I’m not a high testosterone kind of person like that, but I still enjoy the notion of a real world education– and the threat of death is a pretty good one. Choosing the right mushroom is not a theoretical proposition; you have come to a place of certainty, not through posturing, but actually knowing. It’s partially about sensation, but it’s also a science.

ANDREA: At what point did you have the impulse to start working with mushrooms, not as food or medicine, but as a sculptural material?

Image courtesy Phil Ross

PHIL: It was when I started to learn how to grow mushrooms. The initial impulse was to figure out how to grow reishi mushrooms as medicine, but when I started cultivating them and learned their growth habits, I immediately wanted to work with them as an art material– a casting material. It was a casting material that could be altered as it was setting. In casting, the amount of time you can work with the material before it sets is called “open time.” In plaster that might be five minutes, and in cement it might be a couple hours. But with mushrooms, the open time is almost as long as you can keep them alive. You can start to think about plasticity and forming things through much more subtle encouragement. The shapes can be controlled via the environment: the temperature, the position in relation to gravity, all these things that we take for granted, but are profound shapers of the world. You can begin to play with these factors and use them as non-physical tools of manipulation. Light, gravity, heat and the cleanliness of the environment determine the form, as opposed to a chisel or a drill or something like that.

Image courtesy Phil Ross

ANDREA: So you were “casting” mushrooms in your studio? And how did you maintain a sterile, laboratory-like environment in a domestic space?

PHIL: I knew how to do canning and beer making, and the techniques involved in mushroom growing aren’t all that different. And then I ultimately learned how to build air filters (a really critical aspect was creating clean air). Off-the-shelf laboratory air filters are ridiculously expensive, and so is much of the other commercial equipment you need to do this, so I created my own.

Some store-bought tools of the home fungal trade

ANDREA: Was it trial and error, or were there particular sources of information that you used as reference?

PHIL: It was pre-Internet, you know. So, the resources I had were primarily books, clubs, individuals, and trial and error. And a lot of people who grow mushrooms are kind of secretive; it’s not the most open culture. I think it just began to be practiced here in the Bay Area in a more open way maybe before other places because of the culture of open-source and a particular history of political/environmental activism.

ANDREA: There’s a lot of secrecy that surrounds mushroom practices? Why is that?

PHIL: Partially because of the history. It was usually a family practice, proprietary knowledge, handed down.

ANDREA: Similar to guarded recipes?

PHIL: Yeah, a closely guarded secret. And if you can do stuff with mushrooms you can certainly make a good profit; you have a proprietary organism that you’re creating. As a field, it has been very closed. Probably because of Paul Stamets’ books the field has opened up quite a bit more. And the Internet has disseminated information to hobbyists, and mushroom growers.

Also, technologically, there was the trickle down effect of the Hepa filter becoming cheap and distributed, a gateway technology that opened up the field.

ANDREA: Who was the author that you mentioned?

PHIL: Paul Stamets. He’s written a number of books on growing gourmet and medicinal mushrooms and took a lot of this very secretive knowledge, codified it and explained it. He wrote a number of books that became the recipes for a lot of people. And they were certainly good guides for myself as well. They were advanced, but they were clear, in terms of how to render stuff.

Mycelium Running (2005) is described as “a manual for the mycological rescue of the planet.”

ANDREA: So this mushroom research started for you in 1996?

PHIL: I think so, yeah, about that time.

ANDREA: So you were saying at that time that most of the knowledge that you acquired was through books or through trial and error and experimentation. But now you find there’s a whole universe that’s opened up online?

PHIL: Oh God, yeah. It’s phenomenal. The cat’s out of the bag. I mean it’s too much for me. It feels overwhelming. It feels like you could do almost anything at this point, there are so many resources.

ANDREA: But has the openness helped your practice or do you see it as something that is superfluous?

PHIL: Things are doable now that are only limited by the imagination, or money. There are so many people doing stuff with mushrooms right now. It felt lonely for a while being this insulated mushroom weirdo, so in some ways it’s a huge relief. Right now there’s just a profusion of mushroom stuff that crosses over between practical technology and the fantastic. In terms of what I’m doing, I’m in some weird graduating point between this DIY artistic person and entering into an incorporated venture. I’ve made the transition between hobbyist into something like an actualist.

The other day I was looking through some recently scanned Google books and I found obscure bits of knowledge from textbooks that were published in the ’60s and the ’40s. Books that had something like a thousand published volumes. They were mainly housed in libraries in agricultural colleges and places like that and now these books are online.

You can start to look at texts and to assemble things in ways that you never could before. The people who run fungal genetics labs right at this moment are looking at the same information that I’m looking at. It’s like having these brand new libraries with the doors wide open and everybody’s wandering in. And we’re just at the beginning of this enormous process. It feels kind of unbelievable.

Mycotecture Alpha (2009) A very literal teahouse made of reishi mushrooms and boiled down into tea that was served throughout the course of the exhibition, “Eat Art,” at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.

ANDREA: And how do you fit in among mycologists, for instance? Do they see the work that you do as relevant to their work? Do they see it as part of their universe, or is it seen as a curiosity, or a threat?

PHIL: It depends who you ask. Yes to all of those things. [Laughs] I’m just doing my thing. I certainly evolved out of my interactions with the Mycological Society of San Francisco; I have been a regular staple at the Fungal Fair that they’ve held here over a number of years. I’ve worked with their Cultivation Committee, and I’ve taught a number of workshops around the Bay Area. I’ve gone and talked to other Mycological Societies around the US. They seem to welcome it. Like, how much sexy mushroom news is there? My work is very good for teaching the science of the mushroom’s life cycle and growth; you can actually show the mycelium with the fruit growing right off it. I often use these mushroom samples as my calling card quite, as a way to talk to research scientists and other folks who are involved in myco studies. They all seem to like it. But, I don’t know what its position is or even if it has one.

ANDREA: How do you introduce yourself? Do you introduce yourself as an artist or a researcher, or a mycologist?

PHIL: I’ve found that familiarity with the language is often the passport for access more than what I call myself.  And not just for the mushroom movement. You can introduce yourself anyway you like if you have the sophistication of vocabulary. I think that a common language becomes the way of entering into any community. When I first started doing this work I sounded like a crazy person, cold calling people and saying, “Hi, I want to work with your oyster farm for four years to grow a structure.” And a lot of people just hung up or said, “What are you talking about?”

The models I make are a means of introducing myself as well, as are the drawings. If you know how to draw or make something that looks enticing, or interesting, then suddenly people will listen to your idea in a way they otherwise might not. Having the illustration along with the words becomes very powerful. The same way that comic books have text and image together to convey something greater. So it’s pushed me to continue to draw and make models because they become the entry point, for no matter how crazy an idea, it appears real in people’s minds.

One of Ross’ “Mycotecture Models”

ANDREA: We’ve been talking about access to information and processes, and the increased level of transparency that the Internet has provided. But at the same time, you’ve been at this for 16 years, so you could have multiple degrees in biology and mycology at this point. I find your emphasis on being conversant and speaking the same language as a critical argument. You’ve worked your way to that point. I’m sure the first years you were operating; you probably met quite a bit of rejection.

PHIL: Yes, quite a bit. (Laughs). At this point my history is my passport as well, and I can point people to my website. And people can then explore my work at their own leisure and pull whatever they need to out of it. It can be a bit overwhelming to get some of these concepts across. “Hi, you don’t know me but I’m just gonna introduce my, my program now, which is intense!” How do you bring the short version of that to a person? Just being able to say, “Hey, go check out my website” is a bit less daunting.  And then they can take or leave as much as they want to. And then usually after they’ve looked at my previous work they find some point of interest, and we can start a conversation there. At this point the world seems more interested in biological projects like this, too.

ANDREA: One of the things that I really like about your work is that it operates on many levels. You’re doing materials research, you’re making fine art: drawings and paintings, and you’re building prototypes. The works that need the most explanation to me are the sculptural works that are the actual mushrooms that you’ve forced to grow into unusual configurations through controlling their environment. It’s not physical sculpting; it’s almost like psychic sculpting. You give them low levels of oxygen, high concentrations of CO2, it seems almost like mushroom torture.

From the “Pure Culture” drawings and paintings series

PHIL: Yeah. Increase the oxygen or give them more gas. Control the regulatory system. I guess a lot of artists are like, “I’m just painting what I see.” But these [environmental] technologies are all around us and they are absolutely what enable us to do so much of what we do. Right now I’m inside of a cave on a hillside that has an HVAC system, lighting, a thermostat, and all the same kind of stuff that allows us to inhabit interior spaces. I feel a sense of being in vitro or inside of a larger control system. Yes, you can rage against the machine, but it seems like the machine is everywhere. And I don’t know if raging against it is the best position necessarily. Maybe it’s better to assume the leverage of control of oneself. That’s how I think about the psychological aspect of it all.

From the “Pure Culture” series

ANDREA: I just see your “Pure Culture” sculptural works as very wild looking, and yet they are rigorously controlled.

PHIL: That’s the beauty of it for me. Some of the sculptures I grow that are the most grotesque looking are the subtlest in terms of their demonstrations of control. That’s why a very great aesthetic teaching experience has been learning about penjin and the traditions out of which things like bonsai and scholar stones evolved. In these Eastern traditions there is a notion of how biological technique was applied to a greater knowledge of the larger environment around oneself. The fungus that looks like some weird sea organism, some cancerous growth, or something like that, those took sometimes the longest to grow. Keeping the organism in this exquisite nowhere zone, between a lot of different states, so it would grow in such an abnormal fashion. That grotesqueness or the uniqueness of it is part of the connoisseur’s eye you could say, “That’s not just a turd on the side of the road; that’s a excellently formed fungal artifact.” It has to do with how one discerns the environment. The “Mycotecture” bricks are obvious about recording the control system they’ve been pushed through. With the more organic looking ones, the artifice is elevated further, but it somehow looks more natural. To me, that’s what makes them really interesting.

ANDREA: And it can take up to a year to achieve those results?

PHIL: Yeah, sometimes even longer. The fungal fruit that are grown into geometric steps and things like that, took even longer, like two or three years to come into being. But, the bricks are actually very rapid. They can be done in as little as a week.

ANDREA: And you’re still growing them with the Far West Fungi mushroom farm?

PHIL: Yeah we’ve been doing a bunch of stuff together.

ANDREA: And you’ve applied for a patent for mushrooms as a sustainable, non-toxic building material?

PHIL: I applied for a patent in November 2011. There is an international patent pending. I actually would like that mentioned. (Laughs).

ANDREA: I will definitely mention that!

Reishi bricks on view in “Intimate Science” exhibition at Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon

PHIL: I feel like I’ve conjured this thing by making drawings and doing the actions and going through the technique. And then all of a sudden, people seem to think that there’s gold in the object. It has the potential to be a substitute for many petroleum-based plastics. It’s left the art world and seems to have entered a Science Fiction novel or something like that. I’m not really a good capitalist but I also feel like “being a corporation” is a fascinating system to be within. With this stuff it’s possible to go into regional production of biomaterials. For instance, here in San Francisco, we could start producing lots of local materials using this fungus and could create a pilot project of sorts. There are so many ways that this technology can be used at this point so I’m just looking around and trying to get good advice, and figuring out what one does with something like this. I feel like I’m on a rocket and I’m holding on. I’m like, “What the hell?”

ANDREA: I can’t imagine that many artists have been in this situation, but rather people who consider themselves inventors. It is interesting you mentioned a possible visit from some big corporations because the last exhibit I curated, “29 Chains to the Moon,” which was much more fantastic and speculative, included a proposal for an open source “sea stead” (a homestead at sea) by an artist named Cesar Harada, who is now designing oil spill cleanup drones. But we had a US Navy “think tank” fly in to see his work. That was both thrilling and terrifying because of what it could potentially mean for this person’s intellectual property.

PHIL: My experience with open science is that it is kind of like the Wild West. It’s not just for weird, creative individuals, but large sectors of practice having to do with technology and science have been scrambled. It’s like everybody’s now trying to figure out how to pick it all up and put it together into whatever it’s becoming. I went to the Open Science Summit here about a few months back and there were these people who sounded like  anarcho-Libertarian radicals, but they were the directors of Drug companies and Insurance companies. And they were saying things like, “We are on the verge of making a trillion zillion dollars through Open Source and Open Network means of solving problems. We have to destroy capitalism as we know it because otherwise we’re not gonna make as much money.” It was just such a weird inversion. And there are a lot of people realizing just how much potential there is in these new kinds of network situations.

Experiments with different types of fungal building forms

ANDREA: Wow. That’s a whole chapter for discussion. But let’s talk about the models. Your models seem to be the more extrapolative works– more fantastic. They have a kind of fleshy look to them that is distinct from the sculpture and the fungal bricks.

PHIL: Yeah. They’re more organ-y looking, more biological. So much of the process of growing this structure is in the way that it comes into being. Which is true with any kind of building. And so as the fungi are growing, it’s like something from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These things are wet, and gooey; they’re exuding things, they change colors, they grow warts.  They go through this rather fantastic kind of transformation and it’s hard to translate that for people who aren’t used to thinking about a bag of goo as an actual engineering material. Usually it’s plastic, or metal, or these very beautiful homogeneous kinds of textures… surfaces. But this is definitely a living thing, and it goes through all these physical and aesthetic transformations as it grows. I wanted the models to look something like they do as they’re growing in the studio.

ANDREA: Before we got on the phone, I was looking online at fungal research, and I came across the National Fungal Culture Collection of India. There seems to be a lot of mention of mycology in India, maybe you’ll know why. But this is actually a new institute that’s been created to conserve fungal samples because apparently there are certain species of fungi that are disappearing altogether. Do you know about this?

PHIL: Sure. In general it has to do with deforestation and climate and environmental change. Just the volume of truffles that is collected each year has been reduced enormously over the past century. A boat about the size of the QE2 used to bring truffles over to the United States. And these days, there are maybe the size of a garbage barge. There are way fewer wild truffles on the planet. As you get rid of trees and environments you also get rid of the fungi that have adapted to them as well; they’re very sensitive to that kind of stuff, and will often have relationships to specific plants and the environments where they grow. There isn’t a very good sampling of world fungi, or even identification. It’s thought that only less than 10% of the macroscopic fungi have even been identified.

ANDREA: Talking about deforestation, and the loss of even medicinal fungi, is a good place to close. But, is there anything else that you want to cover?

PHIL: I’ve done a ton of engineering tests this past year as part of the patent process to figure out what makes fungi grow stronger or not. And to all accounts it seems like you can use this process in a host of different applications, ranging from the more pedestrian things like furniture or building materials but even up to such far out applications as growing fungal shapes to grow human organs within, or organic batteries or even computers. So it can kind of become a lot of things. It’s sort of like a plastic that can potentially be used for God knows what.

ANDREA: We just watched The Graduate with our daughters who are probably too young to watch it. But I just imagine the father’s friend offering advice to Dustin Hoffman as, “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. MUSHROOMS.”

PHIL: Yes, mushrooms. I get approached by a lot of undergraduates and graduate students in biology, biotech, or in environmental science, and they’re looking for direction. I tell them, “The future is fungal.”

Mushroom Material Company Ecovative Wins First Place in the 2013 Buckminster Fuller Challenge! | Inhabitat

by Morgana Matus, 10/22/13

The BFI has just named New York-based Ecovative Design as their top prize winner for the prestigious 2013 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. The company will receive $100,000 to further develop their groundbreaking mushroom material that provides an earth-friendly alternative to conventional plastics. Eben Bayer, Gavin McIntyre, and the rest of the team behind the new class of home-compostable biomaterials will receive their award at the Cooper Union in New York City on November 18, 2013.

In line with Buckminster Fuller’s commitment to advocating change through design, Ecovative uses the power of living organisms to create an alternative to conventional packaging. The six-year-old business developed their cost-competitive technology to disrupt the status quo of unpredictable and irresponsible waste streams that pollute the environment. The feedstock for the mushroom material can serve as a source of income for farmers as it is grown on their agricultural waste. Intended for temporary use, the material breaks down in compost and landfills instead of persisting for generations.

“We answered the Buckminster Fuller Challenge because we believe in the power of our people to make a real, positive impact. Today, Ecovative looks forward to further answering Bucky’s challenge, as we continue to innovate mycological biomaterials and reach an ideal state, with social and environmental considered equally with economics,” said Ecovative co-founder and Chief Scientist, Gavin McIntyre.

Ecovative is in partnership with the Sealed Air Corporation, who grow their own products in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Sealed Air is the only license holder in Europe and North America, and Ecovative hopes to pursue sales to other geographic regions. With the help of mycelium, their efforts have the potential to make toxic and persistent oil-based materials obsolete and radically change the way industry impacts the environment.

+ Ecovative Design

Via The Buckminster Fuller Institute

Ecovative Teams Up With Ford to Create Compostable Car Parts from Mushrooms | Inhabitat

Ushering in a new generation of partially compostable cars, Ecovative has teamed up with Ford to use their mushroom-based foam as a key component in bumpers, side doors, and dashboards. The best part is that the material will decompose just one month after being buried. Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer discovered that mycelia (mushroom roots) are a natural binding agent that can be combined with agricultural products such as corn and oat husks to make an incredibly durable material that can replace styrofoam and polystyrene in practically every application. Several companies from a number of industries are looking to the Green Island, NY-based startup to cook up alternative materials for their products as well — so we can finally leave polystyrene and styrofoam in our earth-loving dust.

Ecovative combines mushroom roots with corn or oat husks in trays of various sizes. These are then left to fester and furl in a dark warehouse for five days, after which the mix emerges glued together. This is then cooked and fried, and voila! a new packaging material is born. Not only is the new product biodegradable, but it is also fire and waterproof, making it an excellent substitute for polystyrene and styrofoam – the bane of every environmentalist’s existence.

The head of Ford’s plastic research department Deborah Mielewski became interested in the product, as that company hopes to replace 30 pounds of each car’s petroleum-based foams with more environmentally sensible alternatives. It turns out that Ecovative’s mushroom foam is every bit as affordable as polystyrene and styrofoam, uses very little energy, and reuses what would otherwise be agricultural waste.

The company, which has approximately 30 employees, has received a total of $4 million in grants and other funding to buoy their research and development initiatives. Other potential applications for their products include cosmetics and computer parts; a wine distributor has even solicited their genius – but we’re not allowed to know why just yet. There is a caveat: Ecovative has to overcome the challenge of maintaining a consistent density with a raw material that is a living organism, but a lot of people believe that they are going to make it work.

+ Ecovative

Via CNN Money

Packaging the Future: Amazing Mushroom Packaging! | Inhabitat

by Starre Vartan, 09/10/10

Fungus amongus! Mushroom filler is fire resistant and biodegradable

Mushrooms are amazing. Not only do they tasty-up pizza, pasta, soup and salads; not only are edible ‘shrooms pretty much calorie-free and full of minerals (which ones depend on the variety) and immune-supporting compounds; not only can they engender transcendental trips, but they soak up chemicals from toxic environments (including BPA), don’t need pesticides or herbicides to grow, and many are gorgeous (or at least interesting-looking) to boot! And now we can add another really impressive thing that ‘shrooms can do for us: packaging!

I talked to Ellen at Ford about how the car company might use mushroom-based biomaterials in the future.

Ecovative Design in New York has used mushrooms to create a heat and fire-resistant, energy-absorbing, biodegradable (even anaerobically, without oxygen), and low-energy material called Mycobond. It was originally developed by two Rensselaer Polytechnic University grads under a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant — according to the NSF,, Mycobond requires “… just one eighth the energy and one tenth the carbon dioxide of traditional foam packing material” to produce. It can be made in all shapes and thicknesses, depending on its use, and can replace unsustainable, environmentally persistent foam packaging in almost every application that it is currently used for. Think electronics packing, insulation, even (as Ellen at Ford speaks about above) as a panel or bumper for cars.

The ‘feed’ that the mushrooms grow on can vary, meaning that locally available materials can be used, which makes the product ideal for manufacturing all over the world: “The raw material inputs of EcoCradle™ are selected based on regionally available agricultural by-products. So a factory in Texas or China might use cotton burrs, and a factory in Virginia or Spain might use rice husks and soybean hulls. By manufacturing regionally, and using local feedstocks, we aim to minimize the trucking of raw and finished materials. And according to the Ecocradle site, it is cost-competitive with polluting polystyrene and other packaging materials.

Before mushrooms can be grown the source material needs to be disinfected (to kill competing spores in order to hold its final shape), but that’s a natural process too. The inventors have replaced a more energy-intensive steam-treatment sterilization process with one that uses the natural organism-killing properties of “cinnamon-bark oil, thyme oil, oregano oil and lemongrass oil,” which anyone familiar with herbal remedies will recognize are often used for natural disinfection. According to one of the inventors of Mycobond, Gavin McIntyre (on the NSF site devoted to the material): “The biological disinfection process simply emulates nature, in that it uses compounds that plants have evolved over centuries to inhibit microbial growth. The unintended result is that our production floor smells like a pizza shop.”

While initially designed to be sold to industrial-level businesses the world over, the company hopes to have an in-home system available by 2013 so we can all make our own mushroom materials to personal specifications.

+ Ecovative Design

Dell Will Ship Servers in Ecovative Mushroom Packaging | Inhabitat

by Jessica Dailey, 04/06/11

Ecovative Design‘s mushroom-based foam material certainly is a hit! Yesterday, we reported that Ford teamed up with the company to make compostable car parts, and today we learned that Dell has announced that they will begin shipping their servers using the eco-friendly fungi foam. According to company officials, Dell is the first technology company to use Ecovative’s material for shipping.

In a blog post, Dell’s Procurement Director Oliver Campbell said that the company extensively tested the material in labs to ensure that it provided the same safety to their products as traditional foam. “It passed like a champ,” writes Campbell. The use of green packaging materials is part of Dell’s larger plan for a more sustainable shipping strategy. The company already uses a Multipack packaging configuration that reduces the amount of packaging needed. The first pilot shipments with Ecovative’s product will be of the PowerEdge R710 server.

“The combination of Multipack and mushroom cushioning make for a super green solution,” says Campbell. “And best of all, the organic based mushroom cushions are easily composted after use.”

Ecovative makes its packaging by placing organic waste like cotton hulls or wood fiber in a mold, which is then inoculated with mushroom spores. The mushrooms digest the waste and take the shape of the mold, meaning that the carbohydrates in the waste provide all of the energy needed to make the material. The packaging for Dell grows in five to ten days.

Mushrooms are not the first green packaging material that Dell has implemented. In 2009, the company began using bamboo to cushion electronics, and now Dell uses bamboo to ship many of its Inspiron consumer laptops, Latitude laptops for business customers, the Streak tablet, and the Venue Pro smartphone. Campbell says that the mushroom cushioning is more suited for heavier products like servers.

By the end of next year, Dell plans to cut out 20 million pounds of packaging materials from its shipments. The company also plans to increase the sustainable content in cushioning and corrugated packaging to 40 percent, ensuring that at least 75 percent of all packaging components are curbside recyclable.

+ Dell

+ Ecovative Design

Via Green Biz

3D-Printed Mycelium Chair Sprouts Living Mushrooms! | Inhabitat 

by Lori Zimmer, 10/22/13

Dutch designer Eric Klarenbeek’s new Mycelium Chair is an amazing mushroom-sprouting seat that fuses organic materials with modern 3D printing technology. Working with the University of Aachen, Klarenbeek developed a way to 3D print with living cells instead of plastic or metal. The sculptural fungus chair is sowed with mushroom spores that flourish over time, creating a new symbol of organic technology.

Klarenbeek’s project explores what happens when you combine modern 3D printing technology with the biological building blocks of fungi. In order to create a pliable material, the designer extracted mycelium from fungus and used the thread-like material as a base. They then mixed the mycelium with a compound of organic straw and water, creating a substance that could be fed into a 3D printer.

The new substance was then printed into a sculptural chair inspired by the natural growth of fungus and organic forms in nature. Once printed, the mycelium is still living, and continues to grow. For design purposes, Klarenbeek dried the chair out and covered it with a layer of bioplastic in order to cease the mycelium’s growing process and to preserve the delicate shape. Living mushrooms were added to retain the chair’s living element, and they will reinforce the durability of the chair as they grow thicker.

The Mycelium Chair shows how living material can be used to make structural elements, such as furniture or even houses.

+ Eric Klarenbeek

Via PSFK

 MUSHROOM INSULATION | Inhabitat

by Jorge Chapa, 07/03/07

Just when you thought mushrooms were only useful as culinary garnishes (or maybe hallucinogenics as well), Gavin McIntyre and Eben Bayer, two students from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found a more noble purpose for the functional fungi- building insulation made from oyster mushrooms.

Greensulate is a fire-retardant board made out of water, flour, perlite, and mushroom spores. The idea came from an assignment which asked that they produce a form of sustainable insulation. The insulation material is grown by pouring the ingredients into 7 by 7 inch molds with hydrogen peroxide. When this mixture is placed in a dark environment, the mushroom oyster cells start to grow into a 1 inch thick panel, which is then dried to prevent fungus from growing. The pair have a working prototype, which in true college fashion, was grown under their beds.

“I think it has a lot of potential, and it could make a big difference in people’s lives,” said RPI Professor Burt Swersy, whose Inventor’s Studio course inspired the product’s creation. “It’s sustainable, and enviro-friendly, it’s not based on petrochemicals and doesn’t require much energy or cost to make it.”

+ Mushrooms Become Source for Eco-Building

A Living, Biodegradable Mushroom Chair By Shinwei Rhoda Yen

Kimberley Mok Design / Eco-Friendly Furniture March 2, 2009

Mushrooms ate my furniture chair by Shinwei Rhoda Yen (All photos: Design Boom) What if our furniture were ‘living’ somehow? Well, this clever ‘mushrooms ate my furniture’ chair by designer Shinwei Rhoda Yen has all the right elements – it’s simple, biodegradable and its underside is graced by small mushrooms. One can easily imagine it outdoors as a comfy seat to use while gardening, and as a tool to grow mushrooms (perhaps ones suitable for eating?). Let's take a closeup view of this fantastic chair:Hey, are those shitake mushrooms?Closeup of the mushrooms... The chair’s bottom is already embedded with spores for easy growing, and the straightforward design allows the mushrooms to grow and live on the chair for years, as they feed off the nutrients of the wood. Eventually, the chair will degrade naturally. The chair presents a minimal and intelligent statement about the life-cycles of consumer products, and it’s one that suggests a re-thinking and re-defining versatility and sustainability to include the humblest of life forms as well.

Building with Mushrooms? This Inventor Says Yes

© Philip Ross

It should be no secret that mushrooms are incredible organisms -- they are edible, they can bio-remediate toxins, but did you know that they can also be used as an organic building material?

Mycologists have worked long and hard to dispel so-called "fungi-phobia," and inventor-artist Philip Ross is another visionary soul who has dedicated his life to mushrooms -- specifically quick-growing mycelia -- cultivating, drying and developing them as a potential building material which, says Inhabitat, "makes it stronger, pound for pound, than concrete."

© Philip Ross © Philip Ross

Mycelium make up the thread-like network below ground, connecting the so-called "fruiting bodies" of the mushrooms that are visible above ground, allowing them to absorb nutrients and are vital for decomposition of organic matter. Mycelia is what Ross cultivates and dries into forms that are incredibly lightweight and surprisingly resistant to fire, mold and water.

To get an idea of what this material can do, check out one of Ross' recent installations "Mycotecture," which was grown out of Ganoderma lucidum (or Reishi) cultures that were formed into bricks and stacked into an arch. In addition, protective finishes can be applied to the mushroom bricks as well.

© Philip Ross © Philip Ross © Philip Ross © Philip Ross

At the exhibition, visitors were treated to a tea made out of pieces of the arch (how often can we say that about bricks?).

© Philip Ross

Ross hopes to further develop the Mycotecture project by growing an entire building for 12 to 20 people out of more complex forms of myco-material. He explains in a recent interview that these mushroom-derived materials

... [have] the potential to be a substitute for many petroleum-based plastics. It’s left the art world and seems to have entered a Science Fiction novel or something like that. With this stuff it’s possible to go into regional production of biomaterials. For instance, here in San Francisco, we could start producing lots of local materials using this fungus and could create a pilot project of sorts.

© Philip Ross

This has exciting future implications for green building -- instead of cutting down, quarrying, hauling and processing building materials, one could have the option of growing them from scratch -- and even eating them later. What can't the humble mushroom do? More fascinating projects over at Philip Ross' website.

Fast Fungi Bricks: Mushroom Blocks Better than Concrete?!

Most people pay attention to the part of the mushroom we see (and sometimes even eat) that grows above the ground – but what about the latticework of tendrils that intertwine inside the dirt from which they grow?

As it turns out, this malleable network can, per Philip Ross, “be used to form a super-strong, water-, mold- and fire-resistant building material. The dried mycelium can be grown and formed into just about any shape, and it has a remarkable consistency that makes it stronger, pound for pound, than concrete.” (via Inhabitat)

Stools and chairs are just the start – stone-like arches and eventually whole buildings may be yet to come. Like bamboo, the speed of growth and workability of the material make it a great candidate for locally-grown architecture, particularly in fungi-friendly climates. The strength of concrete, but easier to create and lightweight to boot – we have not seen the last of mushroom-based building technologies.

Phillip Ross Molds Fast-Growing Fungi Into Mushroom Building Bricks That Are Stronger than Concrete | Inhabitat by Mark Boyer, 09/23/12

Mycologist Philip Ross is seriously into mushrooms, but not as a food -- instead, he uses fungi as a building material. Beneath the surface of the ground, fungi form a wide network of thin, rootlike fibers called mycelium. That part of the fungus isn't particularly tasty, but Ross discovered that when dried, it can be used to form a super-strong, water-, mold- and fire-resistant building material. The dried mycelium can be grown and formed into just about any shape, and it has a remarkable consistency that makes it stronger, pound for pound, than concrete.

We discovered Ross’ unique mycelium material at The Workshop Residence in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood during AIA SF‘s month-long Architecture and the City festival. There, Ross is erecting a small laboratory in which he will grow mushrooms that will be used to produce a series of chairs and stools. “I want to demonstrate how you can create this kind of fabrication using local agricultural waste,” Ross told Food Republic regarding his Workshop Residence furniture.

The lab was still under construction when we visited, but some of Ross’ completed works were on display. The exciting thing about mycelium is that it can be used to build virtually anything. In many of Ross’ creations he grows the fungus into a brick, which becomes super hard and surprisingly lightweight once it dries. For example, in Mycotecture, one of his most ambitious structures, Ross grew the fungus Ganoderma lucidum (or Reishi) into bricks at the Far West Fungi mushroom farm in Monterey, California, and stacked them into an arch. A variety of different lacquers and finishes can also be applied to the outer layer of the bricks to seal them and give them a glossy finish.

“It has the potential to be a substitute for many petroleum-based plastics. It’s left the art world and seems to have entered a Science Fiction novel or something like that,” explained Ross in a recent interview with Glasstire. “With this stuff it’s possible to go into regional production of biomaterials. For instance, here in San Francisco, we could start producing lots of local materials using this fungus and could create a pilot project of sorts.”

In 2011, Ross applied for a patent for the use of mycelium as an organic building material (the patent is still pending). Ross isn’t just interested in mycelium’s potential as a building material, though — he also uses it as a medium for fine art. His work has been on display at several at museums around the world, and his work is currently part of the “Intimate Science” exhibition, which opens at Real Art Ways in Hartford Connecticut in November.

+ Philip Ross

+ The Workshop Residence

Terreform One Developing Buildings Made From Blocks of Mushrooms | Inhabitat by Andrew Michler, 05/18/11

Houses made from mushrooms used to be for smurfs — but the creative folks at Terreform One and Planetary One intend to create real houses from the prodigious plant. They are developing a new breed of “Mycoform” building blocks made from mushrooms that can literally grow themselves. The project uses a vegetative form of fungus known as mycelium, whose tendrils develop into a thick matt. In fact the growth of the fungus is so prodigious it can be considered the largest living thing on the planet.

The fungus is apt at breaking down complex organic molecules in the environment and using them as building blocks. The team at Planetary One is harnessing this process to grow the material in molds using organic cellular material for food. Their prototypes utilize the North American species Ganoderma lucidum, which they placed in a mold with a mixture of oak pellet fuel, wheat bran, gypsum, and hydrogen peroxide to produce a fine matrix of material with structural properties conducive for use as a construction material. They created a replica of the New Museum in only ten days to demonstrate the quick-growing bio-building blocks.

The fungal building block concept is not only environmentally sound — it requires only readily available waste organic material and needs no extra energy — but it may also have the capacity to clean the environment. Bioremediation uses fungus to break down toxic organic material into inert building blocks—imagine transforming superfund sites into factories that produce regenerative building products.