Fungal architecture

Abstract

As one of the primary consumers of environmental resource, the building industry faces unprecedented challenges in needing to reduce the environmental impact of current consumption practices. This applies to both the construction of the built environment and resource consumption during its occupation and use. Where incremental improvements to current practices can be realised, the net benefits are often far outstripped by the burgeoning demands of rapidly increasing population growth and urbanisation. Against the backdrop of this grand societal challenge, it is necessary to explore approaches that envision a paradigm shift in how material is sourced, processed and assembled to address the magnitude of these challenges in a truly sustainable way, and which can even provide added value. We propose to develop a structural substrate by using live fungal mycelium, functionalise the substrate with nanoparticles and polymers to make a mycelium-based electronics, implement sensorial fusion and decision making in the fungal electronics and to growing monolithic buildings from the functionalised fungal substrate. Fungal buildings will self-grow, build, and repair themselves subject to substrate supplied, use natural adaptation to the environment, sense all what human can sense.

Wood-Veneer-Reinforced Mycelium Composites for Sustainable Building Components

“…In order to compensate for the lack of tension and bending resistance of mycelium, research on reinforcing mycelium has been developed recently. Woven textiles, wood fibers, or 3D-printed spatial lattices are among the methods used [ 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ]. However, these studies either heavily rely on manual production, or currently present very limited data about the effects of the reinforcement on the mycelium-based composite strength.…”

Mem-fractive Properties of Mushrooms

“…growing architecture structures. Thus, in [3] we discussed how to: produce adaptive building constructions by developing structural substrate using live fungal mycelium, functionalising the substrate with nanoparticles and polymers to make mycelium-based electronics, implementing sensorial fusion and decision making in the fungal electronics. Why we are looking for memristive properties of fungi?…”

“…A memristor is a material implication [5,23] and can, therefore, can be used for constructing other logical circuits, statefull logic operations [5], logic operations in passive crossbar arrays of memristors [25], memory aided logic circuits [22], self-programmable logic circuits [4], and, indeed, memory devices [16]. If strands of fungal mycelium in a culture substrate and the fruit bodies show some memristive properties then we can implement a large variety of memory and computing devices embedded directly into architectural building materials made from the fungal substrates [3].…”

Fungal photosensors

“…Recent examples include algae facades [19,25], buildings incorporating bio-reactors [35] and buildings made from pre-fabricated blocks of substrates colonised by fungi [31,3,8]. Not long ago we proposed growing monolith constructions from live fungal materials, where living mycelium coexist with dry mycelium functionalised with nanoparticles and polymers [2]. In such monolith constructions, fungi could act as optical, tactile and chemical sensors, fuse and process information and make decisions [1].…”