Building the future - from mushrooms!

The future of building is revealed - and it involves mushrooms:

Typically “fungus” and “building” are not words people like to hear together. While we were busy scrubbing the black mold off our bathtubs, David Benjamin, head of the New York architectural firm The Living, was designing the Hy-Fi, a 40-foot-tall circular fungal tower, and potential precursor for more eco-friendly skyscrapers.

As the winner of MoMA’s annual Young Architects Program (YAP), Benjamin will exhibit the Hy-Fi in the courtyard at MoMA’s satellite art and event space PS1 in Queens starting late June. Now in its 15th season, YAP’s theme this year is sustainability and recycling. YAP also wanted a design that would provide shade, seating, and water for attendees of MoMA PS1’s 2014 Warm Up summer music series. Benjamin prevailed with a design he claims will generate no waste, requires no energy, and is 100% organic.

We've already discovered how mushrooms can solve our waste management problems and will grow into eco-friendly cars so it should be no surprise that we will be growing buildings from the little mycological darlings:

To create the Hy-Fi, the fungus bricks will be placed at the bottom the structure, while a second kind of reflective bricks, created with a daylighting mirror film devised by 3M, will be placed at the top. The reflective bricks will focus the light down the tower to create a kind of supersized petri dish, encouraging the mycelium to grow and the bricks to solidify and bond together.

Wonderful!

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Friday Fungus: building with mushrooms...

That's right - not only can you make car body panels from mushrooms but now you can build houses!

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.

And the picture above is the proof - viva mushrooms!

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Who to believe?

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Two articles from Inside Housing:

Firstly:

According to figures for the first six months of 2011, housebuilders registered nine per cent more new homes compared to the same period in 2010 - from 58,571 to 63,832.

 Of these, public sector registrations were up from 20,182 in 2010 to 23,132 in 2011 - an increase of 15 per cent.

And then there's:

Construction of public housing has fallen in the second quarter of 2011 as spending cuts begin to hit.

 According to the latest Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors construction market survey, there was a 17 per cent rise in chartered surveyors reporting a fall in the level of public housing construction.

Hey ho!


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Built to last....

OK it hasn't got a roof and a fair few other bits are missing but visiting Kirkstall Abbey brought up a thought (well Kathryn's thought really).

Do we still build stuff to last as long as this abbey? Do we think about forever - 600, 700, even 800 years - when we build public buildings? Or has our loss of any idea of eternity been replaced with a prosaic, practical perspective?

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