![]() ![]() First, living fungus might behave as a self-healing material, simply re-growing if it becomes damaged. There are two principal advantages to this. ‘It’s very early days to start saying your house will be made entirely of fungus.’ Phil Ayres, Centre for Information Technology and Architecture, Copenhagen, Denmark Foremost in his mind is building with living fungus. He wants to think about what entirely new kinds of building might be made from fungi. He said that Mogu is also developing mycelium -based insulation material for buildings.Īyres is hoping that the F UNGAR project will go way beyond just using fungi-based products as components in existing building designs. The company’s chief technology officer Antoni Gandia is another FUNGAR project partner. Mogu, a company based near Milan in Italy, already produces and sells sound-dampening velvet-textured wall tiles and floor tiles based on mycelium foam. ‘ It’s very early days to start saying your house will be made entirely of fungus, ’ said Ayres. Wosten says they are getting all sorts of candidate building materials with different mechanical properties. By varying the type of fungi and agricultural waste, the growth conditions and the post-processing, Prof. ‘ If we press it we can get a material like hardboard, ’ said P rof. They can also process it, for example by applying coatings or by squashing it. Then they heat-treat it to kill the organism. This binds the straw together, producing a white- ish foam-like material. Then they allow the fungi to grow for about two weeks, until the fungus has colonised the straw. Wosten’s lab in Utrecht, the team have been combining mycelium, the ‘roots’ of fungi, with agricultural waste such as straw. Wosten has been experimenting with how to make building materials. The F UNGAR project began in late 2019 and so far Prof. The mycelium composite can be grown over a woven scaffold for a period of 7-10 days, eventually encasing the structure. All this makes fungi buildings a climate win – and certainly miles better than using concrete, steel and bricks. Plus, fungi bricks permanently fix some of that waste inside them and so act as a store of carbon. 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 by composting or burning. They need to digest food and so produce carbon dioxide, like animals do. Fungi are not consumers of CO2 like plants are. ![]() Ĭan fungi really help? Absolutely, says mycologist Professor Han Wosten at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. ‘ It’s like building a Manhattan every month for the next 40 years, ’ said Ayres, borrowing a line from Bill Gates. We need a lot more homes and if you do the maths, the amount we need to build is staggering. Such troubles are set to worsen over the next decades as the world’s population grows faster and gets wealthier. These days it is a lucrative commodity and controlled in some parts of the world by sand mafias and stolen by the boatload from islands. It takes a special sort, with just the right roughness, to make concrete. Take sand, one of the principal ingredients in concrete. Construction also uses vast amounts of natural resources. Buildings and construction are responsible for 39% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions – and a whopping 2 1 % of those emissions come just from the making of steel and concrete. But there is certainly good reason to drastically rethink construction. Mushrooms might sound like an outlandish building material. That’s why he and three colleagues have begun the FUNGAR project – to explore what kinds of new buildings we might construct out of mushrooms. But this project and others like it were using fungus as a component in buildings such as bricks without necessarily thinking about what new types of building we could make from fungi. ‘ It was impressive, ’ said Ayres, who is based at the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture in Copenhagen, Denmark. This mushroom monument gave architectural researcher Phil Ayres an idea. Each of the 10,000 bricks had been made by packing agricultural waste and mycelium, the fungus that makes mushrooms, into a mould and letting them grow into a solid mass. The installation, called Hy-Fi, was designed and created by The Living, an architectural design studio in New York. ![]()
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