Mycelium Mockup

The installation is fabricated of cellulosic wood waste and living mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms. This thread-like fungus plays an essential role in the natural world, aiding in the decomposition of materials and converting them to biologically available elements. During the installation, the structural elements of the wall produce edible oyster mushrooms, providing a source of food as well as screen for video projections that investigate the tensions implicit in the desire to control natural processes. At project end, what is not eaten is composted, returning valuable organic matter to the local ecosystem.

The installation provokes fundamental questions about our relationship to architectural materials. Buildings are erected and razed at a frenetic pace in pursuit of ever-increasing returns on investment in contemporary market economies. Architecture determined by revenue models results in materials that are discarded long before the end of their useful life. Rather than building for the ages, sustainability in the context of these rapid cycles of demolition and speculative construction calls for radically biodegradable architectural materials that anticipate their inevitable demolition by encoding organic decay into their basic structure. Mycelium Mockup is an exploration of a next generation material that explores our conflicting aspirations latent in the architectural development of cities.