Archinect - News

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...

Mushrooms hold the key for this year’s winning proposal at the Tallinn Architecture Biennale in Estonia

2021-10-12T14:18:00-04:00

A trippy trend in building technology has taken top billing at the 6th annual Tallinn Architecture Biennale in the Baltic nation of Estonia.

Using 3D-printing technology, the Australian team of Simulaa and Natalie Alima has taken a timber-frame formwork imbued with mycelial fibers that grow to envelop the structure, allowing it to decay along an algorithmic process that, in fitting with the competition’s mandate, biologically expresses the slow passage of time.

The installation contained within ‘incubation bag’ to create ideal conditions for mycelial growth © Simulaa

With the Biennale’s theme being “Edible; Or, The Architecture of Metabolism,” the concept offers a very wavy way of considering how materials and methods can be better used to help buildings adapt to local environments through projects that “take a long, romantic and human-centric view towards construction technology.”

Section illustrating the ‘forest’-like qualities of the installation © Simulaa

“This project curates an ...

How mushroom architecture is being used to address Cleveland's housing crisis

2018-07-09T17:53:00-04:00

Inspired by the work of inventor Philip Ross and his company MycoWorks, Maurer argues that one of the keys to addressing Cleveland’s housing crisis lies in an unlikely source: mushrooms. Specifically, in using mycelium – the vegetative part of a fungus – and Cleveland’s other “natural” resource, construction waste, in a process called “biocycling”, which essentially recycles old buildings into new ones using plant materials.

“I like to refer to Cleveland as ‘ground zero’ for biocycling,” says Maurer, who believes the city has the perfect conditions and challenges to serve as a prototype for the process.

Cleveland architect Christopher Maurer of Redhouse Studio argues how mycotecture (architecture that uses mushrooms and fungi) and “biocycling” can be used to help solve his hometown's dire housing challenges, and how these methods will hopefully become a model of sustainable construction in cities everywhere.

The case for a semi-permeable architecture

2018-01-29T20:18:00-05:00

Our current built environment squanders too much fresh water and other vital resources, and tips too many poisonous substances into our surroundings. To develop a more sustainable relationship with the natural world, we need to allow chemical exchanges that take place within our living spaces, and between the inside and the outside. We need to embrace permeability.

Professor of experimental architecture, Rachel Armstrong, endorses a renewed symbiotic relationship between the built and the natural worlds and explains the benefits of permeability with the help of recent technological developments in the field of biodesign, such as mycotecture, algaetecture, bioplastics, and a variety of bioreactors.

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.