Archinect - News

Researchers debut mycelium glamping cabin prototype

2024-05-06T17:04:00-04:00

A new experimental demonstration glamping concept that represents likely the first building project made using mycelium in the Czech Republic has debuted from the home reconstruction financier Buřinka with a cross-disciplinary team from Mykilio and the Czech Technical University called MYMO.

Rendering courtesy Buřinka and MYMO

The SAMOROST concept is the latest example of sustainable construction using mushroom-based compounds as an alternative material to insulate external walls, roofs, and floors, as well as other non-load-bearing components. The cabins were designed using special proprietary mycocomposite, which they claim has been proven in lab testing over the past two years to have suitable qualities for residential structures. The experiment sought to improve usability for campers and is being pursued with support from the country’s Minister of the Environment, Petr Hladík.

Rendering courtesy Buřinka and MYMO

Design author Tomasz Kloza, a final year Master's in architecture and...

Better green materials are still needed to trigger a revolution in the building sector, experts say

2023-12-14T13:56:00-05:00

Repeated calls for the decarbonization of architecture are sometimes met with criticisms as to their lack of substance, and in some cases, practicality or overall feasibility, Canada's National Observer tells us.

The only mycelium binders on the market are, for example, unsuitable to certain weather conditions, according to Yale Center for Ecosystems and Architecture’s Mae-ling Lokko. Other products like composite wood materials can contain formaldehyde, which puts a damper on the new heights mass timber designs are reaching in Europe and North America. The current limitations of bio-concrete, hemp, and algae materials are also well-known.

To enact a truly revolutionary turn, both additional investments into developing new alternative products and a better understanding of a building’s end-of-life recyclability are needed, Lokko and Naomi Keena of McGill University's School of Architecture told the paper.

Canada and its vast reserves of agricultural waste derived from applicable c...

This Japanese housing project utilizes regenerative architecture to support its natural surrounding environment

2023-07-10T18:37:00-04:00

Japanese regenerative architectural design studio tono Inc. has designed a sustainable residence noted for its positive impact on the surrounding environment.

Image: Rui Nishi

Located on the southern Japanese island of Yakushima, Sumu Yakushima applies regenerative architecture to reconceptualize the relationship between human habitation and the natural environment.

Image: Rui Nishi

The project’s design takes a holistic view of the surrounding river basin, mountains, and sea. It combines traditional Japanese civil engineering with contemporary technology.

Image: Wataru Aoyama

The key aims of the design included designing the underground environment, orienting buildings based on a thorough understanding of water and air flows through the landscape, and creating an ongoing connection with nature through architecture.

Image: Rui Nishi

Sumu Yakushima consists of several separate buildings that are organized in a layout that respects the pre-existing nat...

400 hanging mushroom bricks used in Studio Link-Arc’s Shenzhen Biennale installation

2023-03-22T11:27:00-04:00

New York City firm Studio Link-Arc has created an installation in Shenzhen formed from 400 hanging mushroom bricks. Titled 'Mushroom Brick Pyramids,' the project was created for the 2022 Shenzhen Biennale, which adopted the theme ‘More than Human Adventure.’

Photo credit: Yu Bai

Seeking to respond to the theme with a project that explored “the intersection between living organisms and architecture,” the studio chose mycelia as their working material due to its ability to survive and adapt to varying environments. As a result, the installation aimed to reflect, visualize, and learn from the organisms in order to inform future architectural applications of the material.

Photo credit: Yu Bai

The resulting scheme was set within a converted old brewery, which included a gallery space between the continuous concrete frames. Beneath the 400 hanging mushroom bricks, a pool was created to provide a moist microclimate, while the indoor-outdoor nature of the space allowed for additional moisture...

Penn State to study how fungal biomaterials can help reduce construction waste

2022-12-19T16:24:00-05:00

Researchers at Penn State are undertaking a study into whether fungal materials can replace traditional acoustic insulation funded by the 2022 AIA Upjohn Research Initiative. The team behind the effort, funded in 2021 by both an AIA Upjohn Research Initiative grant and a SOM Foundation Research Prize, is being led by assistant architecture professor Benay Gürsoy from Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture Stuckeman School - Department of Architecture.

The project is titled Fungal Biomaterials for Sustainable Architectural Acoustics and builds on Gürsoy and her team's work at Penn State’s Form and Matter (ForMat) Lab, whose specialty involves fabricating biodegradable building components using mycelium. The new research path will focus specifically on the acoustic absorption properties of mycelium, with the goal of designing and building acoustic panel prototypes to be tested in the built environment.

“Mycelium-based composites are renewable and biodegradable biomaterials tha...

Researchers have found ways to use mushrooms to decarbonize construction waste

2022-10-21T14:59:00-04:00

Megadeveloper Lendlease is one of the entities behind a new study into the use of mushrooms as a means of decarbonizing construction waste through their application on discarded asphalt roofing shingles.

The company teamed with Rubicon Technologies, Mycocycle, and Rockwood Sustainable Solutions to complete a pilot project at the latter’s facility in Lebanon, Tennessee.

Image courtesy Mycocycle

Shingles removed from a total of 214 homes following a recent re-roofing project at the U.S. Army’s Fort Campbell installation in nearby Kentucky were then broken down thanks to an infused mix of three different strains of fungi in a process called mycoremediation.

"Every asphalt shingle from those 214 homes would have gone to a landfill," Sara Neff, Head of Sustainability at Lendlease Americas, said of the 11 to 13 million tons of the product the EPA estimates winds up in landfills annually.

Image courtesy Mycocycle

"There was simply no viable use for them," she continued. "We understand the i...

Expo of biomaterial structures populates University of Virginia campus, created by architecture students and scholars

2022-04-11T09:00:00-04:00

The University of Virginia (UVA) campus has become the showground for an array of creative structures built from natural materials. The Biomaterial Building Exposition (Bio-Build Expo for short) was organized by the university’s architecture school and showcases the possibilities of organic, bio-based materials including salvaged lumber and fungal structures.

Penn State researchers Benay Gürsoy (assistant architecture professor) and Ali Ghazvinian (PhD candidate) collaborated with Arman Khalilbeigi and Esmaeil Mottaghi from Paragen Creative Studio to design a spatial structure made from mycelium blocks. Photo by Sanjay Suchak, University Communications. Photo by Sanjay Suchak, University Communications

The exhibition, and the projects featured within it, were created by a combination of UVA students, visiting scholars, and biomedical engineering researchers, led by UVA assistant architecture professors Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann. “It is both old-school and new-school,” MacDona...

New research study indicates chitin could be a suitable building material for Mars habitation

2020-09-30T13:08:00-04:00

A study conducted by Javier Fernandez and colleagues from Singapore University of Technology and Design provides research that the bioinspired material, chitin, would be a viable building material for Mars inhabitation and tool production.

Fernandez shares with Universe Today that by reverse-engineering chitin production and combining it with an analog of Martian soil, new chitinous material was created. This material called biolith has presented itself to be highly useful in creating rigid structures using minimal energy output.

“The technology was originally developed to create circular ecosystems in urban environments, but due to its efficiency, it is also the most efficient and scalable method to produce materials in a closed artificial ecosystem in the extremely scarce environment of a lifeless planet or satellite,” explains Fernandez.

Biocycler wants to recycle construction waste into new building materials

2018-01-30T15:09:00-05:00

Waste from construction and demolition sites accounts for approximately 15-30% of all landfill content in the United States. According to NASA's estimates, more than 500 million tons of often non-biodegradable building materials containing carcinogens and other toxins are sent off to the junkyard yearly.

Seeking to alleviate some of these environmental consequences of the built environment, Chris Maurer of redhouse studio has created the Biocycler, a mobile machine to be placed at demolition sites in order to recycle waste. Maurer, who previously served as director of the non-profit firm MASS Design Group in Rwanda, has teamed up with both NASA and MIT for the project, which is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to build a working prototype.

The machine, which will collect waste on site, uses living organisms, primarily mushrooms, as binders to form ground up trash materials into bricks. Fungi—Earth's great decomposer—contains mycelium, the vegetative part of mushrooms that ...

Arup proposes using food waste as building materials

2017-10-17T15:08:00-04:00

The company argues that organic waste would ameliorate rising levels of waste and shortfalls of raw material, as well as providing industry with cheap, low carbon materials.

Beyond being delicious, peanuts, rice, bananas, potatoes and mushrooms have something else in common—they are all being proposed by Arup group as potential building materials in their new report titled "The Urban Bio-Loop."

THE BIOLOOP Nature becomes an endless source of feedstock for the built environment

According to the authors, the report aims "at demonstrating that a different paradigm for materials in construction is possible." This could be done by diverting, in part, organic waste that is traditionally managed through landﬁll, incineration and composting to become a resource for the creation of construction engineering and architecture products.

CURRENT MODEL Biological loop considering traditional disposal options

Some of the organic materials proposed are: peanut shells, which can be used to produce low-cost partition boards that are resistant to moisture and fire; rice, whose husks can be turned to ash and mixed with cement to reduce need for fillers; bananas, whose fruit...

Exchanging cinderblock for 'shrooms with "fungi bricks"

2017-05-30T12:48:00-04:00

To most people, mushrooms are a food source. To mycologist (mushroom scientist) Philip Ross, fungi are much, much more. In fact, Ross is most passionate about mushrooms’ ability to be used for building materials and it is this is what he primarily focuses his attention on. Recently, the mycologists figured out how to make bricks from growing fungi that are super-strong and water-, mold- and fire resistant.

Referred to as "mycotecture," the mushroom bricks originally were embraced by the art world, but increasingly are being considered for other structural uses.

Stronger and cooler-looking than concrete, the above fungi-brick structure is held together using chopsticks.

Interview with David Benjamin, creator of MoMA PS1's "Hy-Fi" Mushroom Tower

2014-07-01T14:18:00-04:00

"[...] In this project, we're using a living organism as a factory. So the living organism of mycellium, or hyphae, which is basically a mushroom root, basically makes our bricks for us. It grows our bricks in about five days with no energy required, almost no carbon emissions, and it's using basically waste— agricultural byproducts, chopped up cornstalks. This mushroom root fuses together this biomass and makes solid bricks which we can kind of tune to be different properties."

Here are a few more photos of Hy-Fi, the locally-sourced, virtually waste-less biostructure by The Living, which just debuted in the courtyard of MoMA PS1.

Photos by Andrew Nunes.

In the video below, David Benjamin talks with The Creators Project about building the structure from agricultural waste and mushroom root, MOMA PS1's interest in sustainability, and how the Hy-Fi could revolutionize waste-less architecture.

‘Mushroom Plastics’ initiative Ecovative wins 2013 Buckminster Fuller Challenge

2013-10-22T19:00:00-04:00

In the past few weeks, the Buckminster Fuller Institute has been introducing numerous finalist entries for the sixth annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge [...]. Today now, the BFI announced the overall challenge winner: Ecovative, a Green Island, NY-based materials science company that has developed a new class of home-compostable bio-plastics based on living organisms, mushroom mycelia — a high-performing, environmentally responsible alternative to traditional plastic materials.

The 'mushroom material' inventors, Eben Bayer, Gavin McIntyre, and the Ecovative Team, will be awarded the $100,000 cash prize at a ceremony at Cooper Union in New York City on November 18, 2013.

Previously: Announcing the 2013 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Finalists